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Cat Lever

CEO/Coffee Runner, Cat Lever, Bookings Agent and Promoter

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Does anyone have any good examples of Global Marketing translations gone wrong?

In Mexico "Got Milk" translated to "Are You Lactating?", and American beer company "Coors" had a campaign "Turn It Loose" which translated in Spain to "Suffer From Diarrhea". Does anyone else have some good ones?

Topics: advertising global marketing language language barriers marketing
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    Anne Dagen 10+

    • +1
    Mar 6 2012: There was the Nova car, translated as No va - doesn't go
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    Cat Lever

    • +1
    Mar 6 2012: Hahahaha that's amazing, I like it! One of my favourite failures is the "Where The Bloody Hell Are You" campaign. It was banned in England for the use of the word "bloody", it was banned in Canada for advertising a brandless beer (in the ad a bartender says "we've poured a beer for ya" and in Canada it is illegal to advertise alcohol unless it is branded), and in Singapore "bloody hell" was omitted for the negative connotations, leaving the tag line as "So where are you?". What a disaster. A very expensive disaster.

    • Robert Bartlett

      • +1
      Mar 6 2012: That's brilliant. I heard about the ban in England for the use of the word "bloody" but I was not aware of what happened in Canada and Singapore.

  • Robert Bartlett

    • +1
    Mar 5 2012: The Australian beer XXXX used to have the slogan "I can feel a XXXX coming on". During the height of Australiana fever in the US, shortly after the success of Crocodile Dundee, Castlemaine breweries tried to sell this brand of beer to the Americans using the same slogan. The only problem was thet XXXX was also a brand of condoms and hence the slogan of "I can feel a XXXX coming on" tok on a completely different meaning!
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