2011年11月9日星期三

Hesitation over pronunciation hurts word of mouth publicity

In 1915, California farmers banded together to rename the ahuacate, a pear-shaped Cheap Rosetta Stone fruit with pebbly skin and an oversized pit inside. They knew this Aztec word was hard for Americans to pronounce, and the Spanish version of the name, aguacate, was just as difficult for them. The new made-up name they agreed upon, avocado, sounds vaguely Latin American but does not present pronunciation problems for English speakers.Those California farmers wisely recognized that an unfamiliar product with an unfamiliar name is hard enough to market, and when it also has a name whose sound patterns are unfamiliar to the ears of the public, thats one success barrier too many.Foreign names for companies or products sometimes do very well in the American market. We also see plenty of pseudo-foreign names created by misapplying spelling patterns found in foreign languages. For example, soleil is the French word for sun. When a suntan lotion placed a circumflex mark over the o in soleil, it created fake French. Such names can appeal to those who have a slight knowledge of the foreign language enough to recognize foreign implication Rosetta Stone Greek but not enough to identify its implementation as wrong.Use the following four-point checklist to make sure youre branding well by giving your name a foreign flavor rather than burdening your creation with a seriously disadvantageous name.1. Does the spelling create uncertainty? A Chinese appliance company uses the brand name Haier for its Germanic implication of technical quality. However, with that spelling, an English speaker might pronounce it either HIGHer or HAYer.Likewise, imagine someone confronting the brand name Pricci for the first time. It might be meant as an Italian surname, but that still leaves open whether it should sound like preachy or like PREEsee or even like a cheeky spelling of pricey. Hesitation over pronunciation hurts word of mouth publicity.2. Are there diacritical marks? These include accent marks, the umlaut (two dots over a vowel, common in German), the o-slash in Danish and Norwegian, the tilde (that little squiggle over the n in Spanish words like seor) and many others. Sometimes these are added because they are Rosetta Stone Spanish (Spain) needed to be correct in the foreign language that is the source of the name, and sometimes, as with the suntan lotion with the extra circumflex, these are added solely for effect.

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