The Western Creative Blog

Many opportunities exist by taking your products abroad. Although the U.S. is still the largest market in the world, many other emerging markets offer vast opportunities for the right products and marketers.

But before you run off to sell your latest product to India, take the time to verify the accuracy of your communications. If both rep and manufacturing principals do not carefully review what you are saying, you may find that your adventure to a foreign land turns out to be a failure.

Believe it or not many major corporations have failed to take the time to properly translate their names, advertising messages, packaging design and even the instructions that came in the product package.

Translation is not something that can be left to any computer or web-based translation program, since the best of these programs are only 90% accurate. I say “only” because, in terms of language and communication, that relatively small discrepancy can be - and often is - the difference between saying the right thing and saying something offensive to your potential foreign customers. Even U.S.-based translation companies can miss the meaning of a word or its relationship in context to the surrounding words due to cultural differences, colloquialisms (seemingly minute regional nuances) or religious connotations.

Being in the advertising industry, we have helped many of our clients translate advertising and packaging so they can sell their products to other lands. I can tell you that the best habit to adopt, if you can call it a habit, is “practicing” attention to detail. It seems obvious, but even huge companies with deep pockets don’t always hit the mark.

Let’s examine the oral care business. What could go wrong when selling the successful Waterpik over seas? Well, when the product made its way to Denmark, the manufacturer was surprised to find out that the word “Pik” in Danish means male genitals.

Now, certainly a company the size of Pepsi would have the resources to not make that kind of mistake, right? Well, when Pepsi rolled out in Taiwan, they used their familiar tagline, “Come alive with the Pepsi Generation.” Unfortunately, this catchy, Americanized piece of advertising translates directly to Taiwanese this way: “Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead.” Sure, it’s still catchy, and it attracted a lot of attention, but it’s probably not what Pepsi had in mind.

Electronics giant Panasonic came out with a Japanese computer made for web browsing and licensed the cartoon character Woody Woodpecker to be the Internet guide. The instructions on the screen read, “Touch Woody the internet pecker.”

Maybe you are thinking of starting your international adventure with our friends to the north. After all, Canadians are lot like us. That’s what some of the folks at General Motors thought when they began marketing the Buick Lacrosse in Quebec. No one bothered telling the guys in Detroit that the term Lacrosse is a popular slang term in Quebec for “self gratification.”

Continuing in Canada, the Hunt Wesson Company moved its popular line of Big John food products into Quebec with the direct translation “Gros Jos,” which translates to “Big Breasts.”  Luckily, this product is aimed at men, and the name apparently did not hurt sales.

Baby food giant Gerber has a language problem in both Canada and France since the word Gerber in French means vomit. Beyond the brand name’s translation, Gerber faced an even larger cultural issue in Africa, where it is common to put a picture of what is in the jar on the label. And what’s on the front of the iconic Gerber jar? A photo of a cute little baby.

Don’t think that American companies are the ones making mistakes. When foreign companies enter the U.S. market, they make their fair share of gaffes. Imagine the surprise when Italian company Powergen built their English-language website for battery chargers only to find out people thought they were selling an industrial strength sex toy. How could this happen?

Here is the web domain name they chose: www.powergenitalia.com, which stood for Powergen Italia. Funny, yes, but probably not the best move for a company trying to enter the relatively puritanical U.S. market.

One company was way too smart to fall into all of these language barrier traps, and they decided to communicate with universal pictures. So the Swedish Samarin, an over the counter remedy for upset stomachs, did just that.

Samarin used three simple drawings to describe their product. The first drawing was a man bent forward holding his stomach in pain. Directly to the right of this drawing was the man drinking his Samarin, and on the far right was the man now standing upright and looking happy.

Samarin company principals were drinking their own product by the gallon when their advertising campaign in the Middle East was a spectacular failure. No one noticed an important detail about how people in the Arab world read: from right to left. Oops.

Although these are funny examples, they exhibit the need for every principal to be concerned about cross-cultural communication. If you don’t feel it’s your duty or expertise, then find someone who can make it their focus. It is impossible and, frankly, not a good use of an agency principal to review every piece of communication that leaves their office, or to know how cultures communicate differently. But it is the responsibility of the principal to put people in place who do practice the habits of highly effective communicators. Because when a marketing disaster takes place, regardless of where, you can bet that the blame will land squarely on the principal’s shoulders.

-Mark Young is the chairman of Western Creative, an advertising agency based in Detroit, MI. Western Creative specializes in consumer packaged goods and serves clients nationwide.

McKees Rocks buried Billy Mays Friday — a native son who reigned as the black-bearded king of infomercials, proclaiming the wonders of lotions, potions, gadgets and gizmos to insomniacs who picked up the phone and made him rich.

“God bless him, he had that voice,” said Jerry Spanola, who was along Mays’ side in the early years as they hawked ginsu knives and cleaning utensils on the boardwalks and strip malls of New Jersey, the original pitchman state.

The voice — booming, slightly frantic, as penetrating as those wonder oils and all-purpose rust removers available only on TV — fell silent a week ago when his heart failed as he slept at his home in Tampa, Fla. He was 50.

“He totally shut down the business when it happened,” said Spanola. “Pitchmen are always talking. The morning Billy died, he rendered that business speechless.”

Friday morning Mays’ body, clad in the signature blue button-down shirt and khaki trousers he made as recognizable as his voice and beard, lay in a bronze casket beneath the vaulted ceiling of St. John of God Catholic Church in McKees Rocks. It was in that river town, a place of corner stores, working families, the occasional gaming parlor tucked behind the cover of a legitimate shop, that Mays was raised.

“So this is what he came from?” wondered Gregg Wolf, whose lighting company worked in “Pitchmen,” the television show that told his story and that of partner, Anthony Sullivan.

The hardscrabble ethic of the town was, perhaps, captured by the Rev. Regis Ryan, who spoke of Mr. Mays and of his hometown, “this old mill town, the struggling community that continues to put its best face forward.”

Fellow pitchmen who gathered outside the church to await the arrival of the hearse, said Mays put his best face forward, never pausing, even when it seemed out-of-step.

Jeremy Parker, a young pitchman from Venice, Calif., recalled working with Mays five years before he broke through on television. They were working a county fair in San Diego. Mays, his belly large in those days, would lean over the microphone at the start of the day and splutter into his microphone like a motorcycle engine — the soundtrack to each opening day of hawking wares.

“Billy could eat and eat and eat and then eat some more,” said Parker who recalled his record of downing ten spicy tuna rolls in one sitting.

In later years, he thinned down. He also rose on TV, where his booming voice sometimes caused co-workers to tell him to not speak so loudly into the microphone, only to be told he wasn’t wearing one.

When Parker moved to the shopping channel QVC, trainees were shown a tape instructing them what not to do.

“They showed Billy Mays. They actually used that at QVC,” Parker laughed.

Like many a virtuoso, Parker said, Billy Mays made new rules by breaking the old ones.

“If there was a Jimi Hendrix of the guitar, there was a Billy Mays of the pitchmen,” he said.

Source - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Engineering a name change can be complicated, said Mark Young, chairman of Redford Township-based advertising and marketing agency Western Creative Inc., formerly Western Communications.

Business owners contemplating a name change should begin by analyzing the reasons, Young said.

“Are you changing the name because there’s been an ownership change that requires it? Are you changing because it’s confusing with another company name? Or are you changing it because it will reflect who the business is and what the business does?” he said.

The first rule, Young said, is like the charge to doctors — first, do no harm.

“Try to measure. What is the equity in the current name?” he said. “Is it a positive equity or negative equity?”

An owner of a restaurant contemplating a name change, for example, might visit local review Web sites to determine the public perception of the business.

“In some businesses, such as hospitality, name changes make a lot of sense if there’s negative equity,” Young said.

“Most people who have tried a club, lounge, bar or restaurant and had a bad experience are likely to remember it and not return. So in that case, a name change can be good, because in the world of local business, most people will give the new name a shot.

“On the other hand, if you’re buying a brand that has positive equity, you need to be careful.”

Whether the business name has positive or negative equity determines how the name change should be handled, he said.

The owner of a well-liked business might want to make the change slowly, or even consider co-branding with the business’ old and new names.

But a business with negative name recognition should slash and burn, eliminating all traces of the prior brand, Young said.

“My advice would be change everything as radically as possible, don’t recycle the logo, image or font, just get away from anything that’s reminiscent (of the old name),” he said.

“But if you’re trying to build on positive equity, you may want to phase in things like fonts, artwork, colors.”

When Western Creative changed its name about 10 years ago, Young said, it was because the descriptor “communications” had become widely identified with stores selling cellular phones or paging devices.

“Though it wasn’t a radical name change, we wiped out everything — logos, colors, literature, business cards. We trashed everything and replaced it all,” he said.

Young also advises business owners to consider the current economic climate, because a name change can be expensive.

-Excerpts taken from a recent article by Nancy Keefer on DetroitMakeItHere.com

Western Creative chairman, Mark Young, was featured in an article this week in Crain’s Detroit Business. The article featured the promotion of online paid search advertising for small businesses. The article included facts regarding the number of consumers who use web searches for discovering and gathering information about products they’d like to purchase. The need for local businesses and CPGs to embrace search marketing is huge. There are millions of searches made every month, and most web surfers do not delve deeper than the first few results pages on search engines. If your site is not absolutely optimized for Google/Yahoo, it’s most likely these consumers desperately searching for your business will never find you. The Western Creative Adnetics department is certified for using Google Adwords and MSN Adcenter paid search programs. Contact us today to learn how we can help your business grow online!

It is no secret that America is in the worst economic climate since the great depression. We are all watching in disbelief as iconic names in business fail over night. Anyone who is in business is at best apprehensive about the future.

The truth is that deep recessions bring opportunity for the right company. During every economic decline there are businesses that grow. An example would be Proctor and Gamble.

During the great depression many consumer manufacturers cut their advertising spending as a means to save money. A very forward thinking and at the time much smaller P&G decided to be counterintuitive. P&G increased spending into of all things “new media”. A risky new format called radio.

It was during this time that P&G launched the original “soap operas” creating a level of brand loyalty and recognition never achieved before. By the time the great depression ended P&G had grown significantly and had massive market share as the economy started growing again.

So how do you take advantage of this down turn?

Sell into need. For the past 25 years Americans have been buying in operational and prestigious brands. Not only is this shifting it is becoming uncool to show conspicuous consumption. Even those with money are cautious about what the buy. This means that you need to promote the value of your product and service.

Capture market share. It is not tough to run a profitable business when every thing is going up. But in a downturn only the strong survive. Chances are many companies in your industry will fail, first don’t be one of them, and second position yourself to grab their customer base when they do.

Increase advertising. The common thinking is to cut ad spending during the down turn. This is exactly why you should increase. When your competition is pulling back you have an opportunity to gain “share of voice”. The less they advertise and the more you do, the more your audience will remember you and not your competitors.

As your competition reduces their media spending the cost of advertising will drop. Right now there are media opportunities available at rates not seen for many years. It is a buyers market.

The bottom line is this; we will see several quarters of negative growth, maybe as much as 4%. Now look at the flip side 96% of the business is still there. Someone wants what you offer; your job is to make sure they know about you. Right now you have a chance to reach them more efficiently then ever and increase market share.

The advertisers that aggressively grow their business and market share now will experience growth beyond anything they have ever experienced as the markets turn upward, which they always do.

-Mark Young is the chairman of Western Creative, an advertising agency based in Detroit, MI. Western Creative specializes in consumer packaged goods and serves clients nationwide.

Welcome to the Western Creative, Inc. blog!

This blog was created to provide web lemmings, like you!, with a multitude of knowledge encompassing our passion and thoughts regarding the advertising industry. Whether you’re interested in direct response advertising and infomercials, QVC representation, brand identity, or developing a TV commercial you’ll surely find a volume of tips and tricks of the trade here at the WC blog. Since Western Creative is your one-stop shop full-service advertising agency, we’re able to share with you a plethora of priceless advertising thought nuggets spanning across all areas of advertising. Also enjoy our other blogs focusing around direct response and shopping channels. There will be plenty of information available soon to help your business take off!