I don’t think I’ve seen something this bad since Reebok accidentally named a shoe after a demon that sexually assaults women.
Want to contribute to my list of unintentionally offensive product names?
rebel with rather too many causes
I don’t think I’ve seen something this bad since Reebok accidentally named a shoe after a demon that sexually assaults women.
Want to contribute to my list of unintentionally offensive product names?
Hahaha… Thanks a billion, I had a good laugh.
Especially the Lolita Bed where I’m sure one of the website guys threw it to the rest of his ignorant team without expecting everyone to think it sounded cool…
:)
Maybe the Lolita line would do better in Japan where they have the lolita fashion[0]?
How does naming something ‘lolita’ cause real problems when most folks aren’t literate enough to know what it may imply? Does the word imbue some magical/supernatural power to the bed?
[0]www.wikihow.com/Be-a-Gothic-Lolita
(using akismet-fooling tactics)
While doing a uni paper on IPTV lately I stumbled upon the service/product called “Virgin on Demand”.
The list on your wikipedia site reminds me of Lonsdale, a brand name that gets used by neo-nazis because you can read the letters NSDA if you leave your jacket half open. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonsdale_(brand)
Note that the manufacturer is very unhappy about this and is actively trying to fight racism.
There’s another category of names that aren’t offensive to the natives of a region, but that are accidentally amusing to foreigners.
My wife once studied in Basel, Switzerland, which has a downtown square named Barfuesserplatz (“barefoot plaza”, perhaps). However, everyone refers to it as Barfi. Of course, McDonalds has managed to plant its flag on perhaps every prime location in most European cities, so there’s a Barfi McDonalds. When I saw the sign, I said “no kidding”.
In Australia, we have Coon Cheese: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coon_cheese
Ikea (furniture company) sells some product with the name “Kaki”. “Kaki” is actually the babytalk for shit in the hungarian language. Not too offensive, but…
No idea what the story is behind the “Turbo Cojones” ad Vokswagen apparently did in Miami, and it’s not the product name. AFAIK “cojones” is quite rude (but I’m not native in spanish, english or spanglish, so YMMV.)
(found on the Intarweb)
http://fortytwo.ch/~avbidder/2006curioso_volkswagen_miami.jpg
Ikea named a bed for children “Gutvik”. When you speak this aloud with a german accent you will hear a “gut fick” which means “Good fuck” in english. :D More infos under http://www.scanpress.de/panorama/49-0.html
Good laugh!
I’ve always wondered how the Mexican food restaurant “Chi Chis” made it. “Chi Chis” in spanish is slang for “tits”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chi-Chi's
The astonishing thing about these is that it’s not that they’re naming them after little known offensive (or at least highly product unsuitable) things. They’re innocently naming them after really quite well known sexually charged words. Sure, it’s not quite as bad as releasing the “Slut” bed for infants, but really. “Incubus” in particular seems like something that at least one person at Reebok should have known.
http://brandfailures.blogspot.com/2006/11/more-brand-culture-failures-part-1.html is a pretty good list.
I doubled up with laughter :-D
I think you heard about Volkswagen Passat. In Russian slang ‘Passat’ means ‘to go to WC’ :-)
fonts,
but Passat is a bad example here, as Passat is the German word for “Trade wind” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_wind and the VW Passat is – at least to my knowledge – only sold in German-speaking countries, so not that bad.
Correct me if I’m wrong :)