Humorous marketing efforts gone tasteless

[D_W]

Listening to a hoarder's show in the background while eating lunch, apparently someone from a clean-up firm used the show as an opportunity to tout their services.

The guy doing the pitch for the service company said something along the lines of "I'm from _____ . We help you clean up and get top dollar for valuables that you no longer want so you have some extra cash to buy cool stuff that you want".

I don't think a hoarder needs extra bucks to buy "cool stuff".

I would guess that the service companies on those shows pay to be on them (rather than being paid to provide clean up services), but it was in fairly poor taste!!

 

[Droogs]

My 3 favourites are Pepsi's early 60's slogan "Come alive with Pepsi" translated as "pepsi will raise your dead ancestors" in the far east

and

KFC for their 2 faux pas
Finger licking good in chinese we will eat your fingers and of course

 

[D_W]

wow, that last one can't be legit, can it?

 

[D_W]

I grew up in an area that is mostly german (central PA in the states). Fairly common to have restaurants and shops that were a mix of german and english, but one of them roughly translated was a place to buy poison instead of a gift shop.

I don't think they cared because most of the residents stopped speaking german in the states in the late 1800s (some of my inlaws still speak a german dialect in the house, though, and at events that are mostly family members. They've only been here for about 240 years and haven't yet acclimated).

 

[Droogs]

humour doesn't travel well apparently

 

[Noho12C]

When I lived in Finland, I used to buy some crackers from the following brand : Rape
They tried at some point to launch their product in US without bothering changing the name

 

[Turnr77]

Two that come to mind are the tweet advertising a launch party for a new album by Susan Boyle

#susanalbumparty

And the genuine still live website penisland.com (Pen Island)

 

[ajsimmo]

When I lived in Finland, I used to buy some crackers from the following brand : Rape
They tried at some point to launch their product in US without bothering changing the name

Similar to some Danish brand Marsh mellows called "Skum"! Very tasty though

 

[D_W]

There's a huge bakery chain here in the US called "Bimbo".

They actually almost got me in trouble at work once (because one of my colleagues took sample language from a report document that had been prepared for them). I took it out and an administrative assistant put it back in.

To my horror, when the client (my client) was reading through the report, they said "ha ha... Bimbo....funny". (the bakery doesn't operate in my region, fortunately, so it looked like locker room humor putting a placeholder in a report).

The bakery itself claims to pronounce it's name "Beam--bo", which I learned years later when they did start advertising here.

Much like people with the last name "fuchs" claim that it's "fe-yoooks".

 

[billw]

Want a zip bag? Go grab a ...

 

[D_W]

What's humorous is when someone from the UK comes over here and bowl locks is said loudly on TV with no censor (public over the air TV). Our scottish friends were horrified "what? why did they just allow that in a country of prudes like the US?"

Nobody knows what it means, plus when we hear it, it sounds like a fish. pollocks.

"no, it means balls".

Yeah, you can say balls here.

"no, it's worse"

We don't really have any profane words for balls, so it's not ever going to translate well. Not sure we have any bad words here that are ok there, though.

 

[Robbo3]

Got over 100 of these. This is just the first 10.

 

[D_W]

you got the bimbo that I mentioned earlier!!

 

[sploo]

I had some Pu Water in Japan once.

Oh, and one of the reps from a long-previous company I used to work for came back from a Chinese trade show with brochures for a company called Fuk Hing.

 

[Exluthier]

I grew up in an area that is mostly german (central PA in the states). Fairly common to have restaurants and shops that were a mix of german and english, but one of them roughly translated was a place to buy poison instead of a gift shop.

I don't think they cared because most of the residents stopped speaking german in the states in the late 1800s (some of my inlaws still speak a german dialect in the house, though, and at events that are mostly family members. They've only been here for about 240 years and haven't yet acclimated).

The German word for poison is ‘Gift’, and there’s a very good restaurant in Basel, Switzerland (11, Schneidergasse) called Restaurant Gifthuettli or ‘The Little Poison Hut’ which originally served many wild mushroom dishes. The name refers to the fate of an unfortunate customer in the eighteenth century ....

 

[Essex Barn Workshop]

If you wish to find out who is the agent for a personality, ie who is their representative, you go to the website
Whorepresents.com

 

[D_W]

The German word for poison is ‘Gift’, and there’s a very good restaurant in Basel, Switzerland (11, Schneidergasse) called Restaurant Gifthuettli or ‘The Little Poison Hut’ which originally served many wild mushroom dishes. The name refers to the fate of an unfortunate customer in the eighteenth century ....

The business here was "das gift haus". Same issue, except no real story to back it up. I grew up in a civil war town, and the tourist trip cuteness junk was over the top. Not a fan of that or intentional misspelling of words for kitsch. Except the people who do it don't think it's kitsch, they think they're being witty.

 

[Deadeye]

PowerGen Italia

 

[billw]

There’s a drink in the far east called Pocari Sweat. I think they tried to launch it in the US without changing the name and it failed

it’s actually really nice, despite the name.

 

[Doug B]

Don’t think they’d get away with this ad these days