Crack Rocks! They’rrrrre Grrrreat!
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Great story here about how Kellogg’s didn’t really do their homework when naming their new cereal Coco-Rocks. Coco-Rocks is Euro-slang for Crack dipped in chocolate pudding while being made.
Oops.
More bad marketing examples here, thanks to Snopes.
July 9th, 2005 at 3:56 am
Other classics Oops…
- Chevrolet’s “No va” cars in Romance language countries (my favorite).
- Citroen cars in North America.
- IBM using Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp in the UK.
July 9th, 2005 at 4:05 am
One more that’s local to NYC - The Italian restaurant, Babo, translates to “idiot” in Korean. (Sorry, Mario.)
July 9th, 2005 at 2:35 pm
Snopes is hardly the last word on some things. Prof. Ricks is well-known for his research in international marketing errors; and I would take his word (along with Harvard and Reader’s Digest) over the Snopes supposed “debunking.”
In my own personal experience I remember working on a menu translation project with a United Airlines exec who told me about some of his newly arrived Korean countrymen being delighted that canned dog meat was seemingly readily available on US supermarket shelves (dog is a delicacy in Korean cuisine).
They couldn’t read English and were depending, naturally enough, on the label pictures on canned dog food.