We live in a global context. So when you’re creating a marketing campaign, you need to think about its implications across many cultures, especially in Canada, whose culture was famously described as a mosaic, not a melting-pot. And things can change as a result of world affairs. In this post, I will explore some recent examples, which are funny, but they demonstrate the need for cultural competence. This means including people with different cultural backgrounds in your marketing team.
Sometimes an unfortunate product name or slogan is just the result of poor historical timing. Sometimes the misfortune results from a lack of research by the company.
Poutine / Putin
If you say the name of the Russian leader as it is pronounced in Russian, it sounds identical to the name of the popular dish with fries, cheese curds, and gravy. In 2022, Le Roy Jucep, the diner where poutine originated, tried to change the name of poutine in protest against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It didn’t work, because the name poutine has become more than a brand name; it has become the generic name of the dish.
Clippy
Possibly the most widely-satirized help message of all time, and certainly one of the most irritating, Clippy was an irritating paperclip character (introduced as part of Microsoft Office ’97 for Windows) that popped up and stated the crashingly obvious. Smithsonian Magazine described Clippy as “one of the worst software design blunders in the annals of computing”. There was no cross-cultural blunder here, it was just that Microsoft had woefully underestimated their users’ intelligence.
ChatGPT
In French, if you read out the name of ChatGPT, it sounds like « chat, j’ai pété ». Doubtless this provides immense amusement to Francophones everywhere, but it probably wasn’t what the company intended. Some people pronounce the “Chat” part of ChatGPT the same as in English, but the rest is still unfortunate. Many people are now boycotting ChatGPT because the terms and conditions of the app do not prevent it being used for oppression.
How to avoid blunders
We have all seen hilarious examples of product naming going horribly wrong, when a word or phrase that is perfectly innocuous in one language turns out to mean something offensive in another language. And there are more subtle considerations such as things that seem cute to one culture may seem unnatural or ugly to another culture. But some cultural blunders are not funny because they come across as racist. They also expose a structural weakness in the company or creative agency that produced the advertising campaign: they don’t have diversity built in at every level, which would enable them to notice the insensitivity before they run the campaign.
Whether your marketing campaign is aimed at a local or a global audience, it is always best to ask people from multiple backgrounds and cultures to check it, and if you’re running your marketing campaign in another country, ensure that you get people from that country to look at it.
Related content
Further reading
- The 10 Best Cross Cultural Marketing Blunders – Commisceo
- 5 Big Brands That Got Multicultural Marketing Wrong – Smart Simple Marketing
- 13 Common Missteps In Multicultural Marketing—And How To Correct Them – Forbes
- Global Marketing Blunders – Cultural Savvy
- Lessons from Marketing Localization Failures: Real-World Blunders and Brilliant Takeaways – Ulatus
- The 5 types of cross-cultural marketing mishaps
- Brand blunder – Wikipedia
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