Foreign branding

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Foreign branding is an advertising and marketing term describing the implied cachet or superiority of domestic products with a foreign or foreign-sounding name.

In English-speaking countries, many cosmetics and fashion brands use French or Italian-styled names to imply a connection to the style-conscious. Food and drink items also use French or Italian names, trading on the high reputation of France or Italy in these areas. One example is the use of the name of the French wine-growing district of Chablis on bottles of generic-quality American-grown white wine, or the Dolmio sauce which isn't even sold in Italy. The practice became common enough that Chablis, attached to an American domestic wine, ultimately came to convey an image of cheapness. The practice has a long history: the cold potato and leek soup vichyssoise was invented at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York in the 1910s and was given a French name to make it sound more palatable.

In the UK the perceived higher quality of German and Scandinavian kitchens led the English company Moben Kitchens to trademark "Möben" in 1977 [1], while the electrical retailer Dixons adopted the Japanese-sounding brand Matsui for its own brand of consumer electronics equipment.

In countries where the common language is not English, English-based foreign branding is often found. For instance, in Germany it is common for television advertisements to be mainly in German, but to end with an English-language motto or slogan; recently, however, there has been a notable shift back towards German due to widespread complaints from language purists and studies showing that many target audiences with moderate English proficiency misunderstood the intended message. The most prominent example in this respect is Sat.1 Television, which abandoned its poorly understood corporate slogan "Powered by Emotion" in favor of "Sat.1 zeigt's allen", a phrase that is much more catchy to German ears and translates into "Sat.1 shows it to everybody" or, idiomatically, "Sat.1 shows everybody how it's done properly" or "Sat.1 shows everybody how (or why) it is superior". Another example was the Finnish telecommunications company Sonera, which adopted the English slogan "Make things click", as in "click in place". The problem is, that the colloquial term klikkaa "it clicks" means the exact opposite, "it malfunctions".

Foreign branding is also often used in Mexico, mostly due to the country's proximity to the United States. In Japanese markets, products often have foreign (or foreign-sounding) names. English has different connotations than Italian or French. The English-sounding names may be Engrishy and ungrammatical in real English, but in some cases may be accepted when the product reaches foreign markets. South Korea-based LG Electronics named its washer and dryer line Tromm. One of the reasons for selecting this foreign sounding name was to imply a connection to superior quality in the domestic market, as foreign brands of appliances were held in high regard. However, Tromm is a global product line for LG Electronics.

The foreign-branded item need not have a name that would appeal to native speakers of the language. For instance, Pocari Sweat, a popular sports drink marketed in Japan by the Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co., has a name that to many English speakers would imply that the product actually contains sweat, rather than the intended meaning of a beverage intended to replace the electrolytes lost in sweating.

In some cases the foreign name may even be offensive to native speakers. There are an inordinate amount of car models that can be used as examples: The Mitsubishi Pajero had to be renamed to Montero in Spain and Hispanic America, since pajero is a Spanish slang term equivalent to "wanker," or even "faggot." However, Mitsubishi originally got the Pajero name innocently from the pampas cat species. [2]. Another example is the Honda Fitta ("cunt") in Sweden and Norway (the car was later renamed.) Buick had to rename its Lacrosse the Allure in Canada, because it was a euphemism for masturbation in Quebec. The SEAT Málaga was marketed in Greece as the Seat Gredos, because the word Malaga was considered very similar to Malaka, an extremely common Greek swear word which translates as "jackoff" or "wanker". Similarly, the primarily-US fast food chain Taco Bell formerly sold a burrito called a chili-cheese burrito. Its name was switched to this when many people became aware that the original name, chilito, is often used as a slang term for penis in Mexico.

[edit] Foreign branding through creative spelling

A Bronx, New York premium-priced ice cream was dubbed Häagen-Dazs to imply "old world craftsmanship and tradition." Häagen-Dazs has no meaning in any European language, although it contains several conventions used in European languages, such as the umlaut. IKEA's unböring advertising campaign is a similar example.

Häagen-Dazs spawned imitators, such as Frusen Glädjé (frusen glädje without the acute accent meaning "frozen joy" in Swedish), another brand of premium ice cream. Häagen Dazs sued unsuccessfully in 1980 to stop them from using a "Scandinavian marketing theme."

The comic strip Hagar the Horrible is sometimes billed as Hågar the Hørrible to emphasize its Viking theme. In German translations the name of the main character is actually written Hägar or Hægar, which makes it similar to the English pronunciation, whereas å sounds more like o.

The fashion for the heavy metal umlaut (use of umlauts in the names of heavy metal bands) can also be seen as a form of foreign branding. Here, the image being sought is probably more specifically Teutonic rather than European in general.

Diacritics are not the only marketing weapons available. Faux Cyrillic lifts entire Cyrillic characters to add "Яussiaи" (which would actually be pronounced Yaussiai) flavor (a notable example is the the videogame TETЯIS, which is written Тетрис in actual cyrillic)). "GrΣΣk" (actually pronounced grssk) characters are similarly used as in advertising for MY BIG FAT GRΣΣK WEDDING. The cover of Madonna's Greatest Hits Volume 2 contains the seemingly Japanese string モヂジラミミヂ, which some people believe is an attempt to render the word "MADONNA" by using katakana characters as stylized English letters. The actual explanation is slightly more complicated. Each key on a Japanese keyboard is mapped to both a Latin and a Japanese phonetic character, and it is possible to switch from one set to the other. The cover text string is made up of the Japanese characters that share the same keys as the letters M-A-D-O-N-N-A. The real Japanese reading, mojijiramimiji, is meaningless.

Even a nonsense word can carry an exotic aura if it uses a foreign rather than native spelling convention. The name of the French soft drink Pschitt is merely an onomatopoetic rendition of the sound made when the bottle is opened, but the -sch- and terminal -tt are German, rather than French, clusters.

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