I recently met a gentleman named Paul. What started off as a quick
introduction turned into a conversation about experiences, Spainglish, and
culture shock.
Paul is charismatic, expressive, and ready for a laugh. His
hair is turning from silver to white and his face has embraced laugh lines.
From what I understood, the twists and turns of his consulting career lead him to
the East Coast of the US. He flies to Asia and India for business often and
expressed a keen desire to do less traveling for the sake of business and more
for the sake of pleasure, curiosity, enrichment, ect. He enjoys laughing and sharing stories about his younger
self – particularly his stories about Columbia. Paul was raised in Calle and grew up in a bilingual (“Spanglish”)
household.
At one point, he began talking about advertising in
Columbia. The example he gave was about Chevrolet’s Nova advertising attempts
in Latin America. In Spanish, no va
means “no go” or “it doesn’t go.” According to Paul, there was a billboard in
Columbia with this advertisement.
For Spanish speakers, the joke was on Chevy: who would invest in a car
that advertises itself as a “no go”?
 |
| Chevy Nova |
The conversation then moved to other multinational companies
trying to localize. I told him about studying in China, and learning of Coca-Cola’s
marketing story in China. Initially, Coke translated its name into Chinese as
“Bite the tadpole” and tried to sell its soda to the Chinese market. The Coke Company was going for a
phonetic translation that matched the sound of the company name. That was their
mistake, because the translation did not make the drink sound appealing or satisfying
to customers in China. They later decided to compromise: they scrapped the old
name, and found a better translation. Now, instead of “Bite the Tadpole,” the
Coke product translates to “happiness in the mouth.”
 |
| Coka-Cola Ads in China |
In the end, Paul and I agreed that localization is a
difficult step for multinational companies. If a company is going to risk
tapping into foreign markets, getting to know the language, culture, and
customs are important.
After all, what is a group of people without their culture, their language, their history, and their traditions?
