Crack Rocks! They’rrrrre Grrrreat!

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.

Bookmark And Share This Post: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

Posted on July 7th, 2005 8:52 am with
Filed under Branding
Tagged with
TrackBack URL for this entry is http://shankman.com/crack-rocks-theyrrrrre-grrrreat/trackback/

3 Responses to “Crack Rocks! They’rrrrre Grrrreat!”

#1 Suzie on 09, Jul, 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.

#2 Suzie on 09, Jul, 2005 at 4:05 am

One more that’s local to NYC - The Italian restaurant, Babo, translates to “idiot” in Korean. (Sorry, Mario.)

#3 Dick Weltz on 09, Jul, 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.

Peter Shankman

CEO, Entrepreneur, Adventurist

Crack Rocks! They’rrrrre Grrrreat!

3 Responses to “Crack Rocks! They’rrrrre Grrrreat!”

Peter’s Book