What is in a name?

by Peter R. Geyer, Managing Principal, Geyer Global Partners

There is an old marketing tale (that is handily debunked here) about how back in the 1970s Chevrolet tried to market the Nova automobile in Mexico, only to find that it sold poorly.  When they looked into the matter, they discovered that "Nova" in Spanish could be read as "no va" which roughly means "doesn't go."

While it turns out that this story is not actually true, it does demonstrate the usefulness of having somebody familiar with your new overseas target market actually review your product, its marketing, and its positioning prior to release.  What may seem like an awesome name or marketing strategy in one language or culture, may actually end up sending all the wrong signals in another language or culture.  Even the best product in the world can be unnecessarily burdened if it unintentionally sends the wrong signals to its international customer base. 

As I have had occasion to walk around Berlin since moving here 6 months ago, I have run across several businesses that appear to be very successful here in Germany, but that I think would have a tougher time in the North American marketplace.  I make my comments here with absolutely no malice or ill will.  I declare here upfront that I have absolutely no relationship with any of these companies, and that I have no idea whether they currently have, will have, or ever have had any plans to expand into North America or anywhere else.  I merely offer my own unsolicited observations based purely on their names as a starting point for a conversation.

Le Crobag

If you have been to a train station anywhere in Germany, you have probably seen the bakery shop Le Crobag.  Since 1981, this award-winning Hamburg-based bakery franchise has offered freshly prepared croissants, sandwiches, breads, and other tasty sundries to commuters and other travelers from 120 stores located in train stations and transport hubs.  It is an excellent concept – selling high-quality, freshly prepared products in high-volume and low-cost, to consumers who are on the move and don't have time for a more substantial meal – and from what I can tell as a casual observer, it is a reasonably well-executed model.  With a website that is not only in German, but French, Polish, and English, it would appear that Le Crobag has aspirations of international expansion. 

What is up with that name?

When the company was first founded, Le Crobag was originally called Le Croissant, but I assume that name was changed because the original was too generic.  Unfortunately, from a North American perspective (if I may be so bold as to speak for an entire continent), the Le Crobag name has a few issues.  The French article "Le" is a good start, as it immediately gives the consumer an idea of who they are, and what they do.  But the word "Crobag" is an epic fail.  First, it sounds like an epithet that a teenage boy would call a female teacher.  I can immediately imagine hearing somebody say, "Mrs. Crabtree just gave me an "F" in social studies.  What a crobag!"  Second, the word Crobag does not even sound French, so the French article preceding a decidedly non-French subject creates an unpleasant dissonance in the consumer's ear.  I get that the original idea of the name was probably combining the words "croissant" and "bag," which makes sense, as they are selling croissants that will be taken away in bags.  It might be more phonetically pleasing to a North American consumer to make the entire name French, by substituting the English word "bag" with the French word "sac."  While the name "Le Crosac" still sounds like a teen epithet, it is at least linguistically consistent, and thus less jarring. 

Bad Couture

On Karl-Marx-Allee in Berlin, there is a very nice bathroom fittings boutique called Bad Couture.  Its large glass windows are filled with attractive and stylish items to make your home’s bathroom look like a place where you would want to spend more time.  Unlike Le Crobag, Bad Couture is a single store and, as far as I know, it has no aspirations for growth overseas.  That is probably a good thing.  While Bad Couture is an excellent name in Germany - where it is a mixture of German and French meaning "Bath Design" - it would be a death sentence anywhere in the English-speaking world.

What is up with that name?

Bad Couture is a real-world example of what is being warned about in the apocryphal Chevrolet Nova story told earlier.  While Bad Couture makes perfect sense in a German-speaking context, Bad Couture in an English-speaking context is an explicit statement that the contents of the store are of tacky or poor design.  A particularly pernicious trap that this particular name would fall into in North America is that it is combining two different languages into a single name (much like Le Crobag).  Even though the phonetic sound of Bad Couture is not displeasing to the ear, its mix of languages would confuse an English-speaking consumer.  Americans generally will know the meaning of "Couture" through wide-spread exposure to fashion magazines and television shows about the fashion industry, and even if they do not, the word is close enough to the English word "Culture" to carry with it positive aspirational connotations.  However, the German word "Bad" has the disadvantage of having the exact same spelling as an English word with strongly negative connotations.  First impressions are key, and you don't want the first impressions to be either confusion or negativity.  

Of course, I do not want to pick only on the Germans.  Having lived previously elsewhere in Europe, I was amused by some American companies that caused me to think, "Oh my!  They'd better not try to export that to Europe!"  And in a spirit of fair-play, I will share with you my particular favorite.

Frugal Fannie's

Formerly a chain, but now reduced back to its original store in Westwood, Massachusetts, Frugal Fannie's was originally, apart from being a retailer in its own right, a clothing wholesaler.  Back in 1983, when one of their major customers went bankrupt and Frugal Fannie's found itself with a warehouse full of clothing with no buyer, they decided to open this warehouse to the public for a weekend to try to get rid of their overstock.  That weekend sale was so successful that they held another one.  Frugal Fannie's realized quickly that they were on to a new concept in retail: keep overhead incredibly low, open only on weekends, and sell clothing at steeply reduced prices.  

What is up with that name?

Fannie is the nickname of one of Frugal Fannie's founders, and frugal definitely describes the type of consumer that they are targeting.  But heaven help them if they ever decide to take their concept to Great Britain.  I had the good fortune to attend boarding school in England back in the late 1980s.  At the time, what Americans call "fanny packs" were all the rage.  These are belted pouches that can be strapped to your waist and that are large enough to carry cameras, wallets, keys, or other bulky items that may not fit in your trouser pockets.  I had one of these fanny packs, which I would use when going into town (really, it was the 1980s, it wasn't that bad back then).  However, whenever I would say something to the effect of, "Where is my fanny pack?  I need somewhere to carry my wallet," my British friends would either give me exceedingly odd looks, or they would immediately fall to the floor laughing hysterically.  It turns out that the word "fanny" is somewhat archaic British slang for female genitalia.  Even though its spelling is slightly different, if Frugal Fannie's moved to Great Britain, it is probably not the best marketing to have a sign over the door that brings to mind a "cheap c**t." (My sincere apology to all concerned for that last comment, but the British slang term is equally vulgar in its meaning.)  Admittedly, the word fanny in North America is also humorous for being polite slang for somebody's backside – generally used by mothers who shy away from using the word “butt” in front of their children – but the joke lacks the same vigorous punch that it carries in Britain.

I of course realize that the names of all of the companies I have mentioned here were developed with a particular market and a particular consumer in mind.  For where they are now, these names are perfectly good and are perfectly appropriate, and I certainly mean none of them any malice or harm by taking their names out of their original and intended context.  But I use them here as examples of how, when you move to a new country or to a new continent, the old rules for coming up with an effective name no longer apply.  That is why it is so important to get advice from somebody with intimate understanding of the target market in order to ensure something as basic as your name does not create the wrong impression.

For more information on how Geyer Global Partners can help your business to "Go Global," visit our website at www.geyerglobal.de.

Geyer Global Partners adds new capabilities

RELEASE DATE:  January 23, 2014

Geyer Global Partners is pleased to announce the addition of Bernadette K. Geyer to its staff as a Copy Editor and Copy Writer.  “Since Geyer Global Partners was founded, I have wanted to be able to offer our clients a full suite of services, from strategic planning services through to marketing and public relations implementation,” said Founder and Managing Principal, Peter Geyer.  “Ms. Geyer’s extensive experience in technical and creative writing, in public relations, in marketing, and in social media make her a perfect addition to our professional staff.”

Founded in 2014 and located in Berlin, Germany, Geyer Global Partners is a strategic consulting firm that helps European startup companies to effectively enter and compete in the North American marketplace.  For more information, visit the Geyer Global Partners website at: http://www.geyerglobal.de

Opportunities in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership

by Peter R. Geyer, Managing Principal, Geyer Global Partners

In February of last year (2013), United States President  Barack Obama stated in his State of the Union address that his country would be launching negotiations on a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (“T-TIP”) with the European Union.  The aim of T-TIP is to:

• Eliminate or reduce conventional barriers to trade in goods, such as tariffs and tariff-rate quotas;
• Eliminate, reduce, or prevent barriers to trade in goods, services, and investment;
• Enhance compatibility of regulations and standards;
• Eliminate, reduce, or prevent unnecessary non-tariff barriers such as regulatory disharmonies; and
• Enhance cooperation for the development of rules and principles regarding global issues of common concern (e.g. environment, labor, intellectual property rights) and for the achievement of shared global economic goals.[i]

While the negotiations for T-TIP are anticipated to conclude as early as the end of 2014, both sides of the Atlantic are notably keen to reach a deal.  After all, while the existing tariffs and trade barriers are relatively low – averaging less than 3% on traded goods – the total volume of bilateral trade between the United States and the European Union countries is massive, generating trade flows of approximately $2.7 billion every single day in 2012.[ii]  Even with the current tariff and regulatory regime, European Union exports in goods to the United States in 2012 were $380.8 billion, up a staggering 67% from 2000.[iii]

While much of this negotiation will look at the trade in manufactured goods, and while many of the anticipated benefits of a successful T-TIP negotiation revolve around the elimination of duplicate or conflicting regulation of goods on either side of the Atlantic, what I personally find most interesting are the areas that touch on services, investment, and regulation surrounding intellectual property rights and cultural protection. 

One only needs to walk down the street in my home city of Berlin, Germany, to see legions of software development firms that are either based in the United States and have offices here, or that are based here and are looking to expand into the United States by courting venture capital investors there.  A prime example of this is European music sharing company SoundCloud.  This company has been written about extensively already by others, and will no doubt be written about again by me, because it stands out as a true European success story in the information age, and because their operations are run only two blocks from where Geyer Global Partners is located.   Founded in 2007 in Stockholm, Sweden, by a Swedish sound engineer and a Swedish musician as a tool to virtually share music among collaborating artists, SoundCloud firmly established itself in Berlin, Germany, soon afterward -- where it has quickly risen to become the world’s preeminent music sharing service.  Now with over 40 million registered users and as many as 200 million unique users worldwide, SoundCloud has most notably signed a Series-C funding agreement with Silicon Valley venture group Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers for a reported $50 million in early 2012.

 

SoundCloud is not alone.  Other notable European start-up standouts in Europe include barcoo, a Berlin-based product research application featuring an integrated barcode scanner that has over 1 million users; XING, a Hamburg-based social and professional networking site that is a more Euro-centric version of LinkedIn that has around 14 million users; and OpenSynergy, another Berlin-based company that develops products that integrate automotive onboard software systems.

While these are all very different software and service companies, they all share a European home, they all are ripe for (or have already received) investments from United States-based venture capital companies, they all have products that would potentially be very appealing in the United States marketplace, and -- particularly in the cases of XING and OpenSynergy -- are prefect for strategic partnerships or mergers with existing United States companies.  If T-TIP is able to reduce or eliminate barriers to trade in services and investment, more companies like these will be able to gain access to the funds and relationships to help them grow and thrive.

The other area of discussion that I find of particular personal interest relates to regulation surrounding intellectual property rights and cultural protection.  There are a couple of issues here worth noting.  While the United States and Europe share strong intellectual property rights protections, the idea behind their inclusion in the T-TIP negotiations is to attempt to set a world standard that can then be copied in other regional trade negotiations.  Particularly in the startup realm, anything that better codifies and enforces intellectual property rights is a good thing.  Negotiations over regulations concerning protection of cultural or linguistic heritage are a more complex issue. 

Two notable, but not unique, examples of this are regulations concerning product naming and regulations protecting indigenous cultural products from being overwhelmed by globalized mass-media.  In the first case, Europe maintains strict rules regarding the naming of regional products, so that “Parmesan Cheese” is a regulated name that can only refer to cheese made by the Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese consortium, and “Champagne” is a regulated name that can only refer to wine made in the Champagne region of France.  At the same time, the United States generally does not adhere to the same strict naming restrictions for parmesan cheese, while it generally does with increasing consistency for champagne.  T-TIP would seek to make regulations in this regard more consistent across the Atlantic.

 

In the second case, the European Union’s Audiovisual Media Services Directive (“AVMSD”), as it currently exists, is designed to counteract a trade media content deficit between the European Union and the United States of between €6 and €7 billion per year.[iv]  It does this by requiring European Union broadcasters to reserve a majority of their broadcast time (excluding the time appointed to news, sports events, games, advertising, teletext services and teleshopping) for European-produced content, and that “on demand” broadcasters must dedicate significant resources to the production and acquisition of European content.  Of this, at least 10% of broadcast time (with the same exclusions listed previously) must be recent (within 5 years) productions by “independent” producers.

Needless to say, with €6 to €7 billion per year on the line, audiovisual media producers in the United States are very keen to eliminate as many of these barriers as possible.  What the European Union would get in return for removing these barriers is less clear.  That having been said, an interesting 2010 report by the Swedish Agency for Growth Policy Analysis[v] uses empirical data to demonstrate that highly regulated and protected industries have a strong tendency to adapt more slowly to changes in consumer tastes and other economic imperatives than more lightly regulated and protected industries.  If we can take this deduction at face-value, rather than providing an easier opportunity for American mass culture to overwhelm more locally produced media, perhaps the lowering of trade restrictions on audiovisual content is a blessing for smaller European producers in that it will compel them to be more flexible and responsive – not necessarily to the world marketplace but to their own preexisting markets.

In support of this idea, I am reminded of the 1996 Telecommunications Act in the United States, which eliminated many of the existing restrictions on the number of television and radio stations a single company could own.  In response to this deregulation, there was a massive wave of consolidation, in which many small broadcasters were bought out (many making extremely handsome profits on the sale in the meantime).  One of the driving principles behind this consolidation was that large group owners could create economies of scale by eliminating duplicative facilities and duplicative tasks across multiple stations, and even by “centralcasting” programming created in one or two broadcast hubs and then sending them to their dozens (or even hundreds) of stations nationwide.  This consolidation was admittedly an extraordinarily painful time.  There were vast layoffs in sales, engineering, on-air talent, and even management.

Over time, though, an interesting thing happened.  These new large group owners realized that by eliminating everything that made their stations “local,” they were eliminating the very reasons why consumers viewed or listened to their stations in the first place.  With the Internet, cable television, and satellite broadcasting, nationwide or worldwide content is easily and relatively cheaply available to all consumers in the developed world.  But only local broadcasters could speak to local consumers in a manner that was meaningful and that met their needs.  Over the course of ten years, as I visited radio stations in small and medium sized markets, I saw them go from empty studios that served only to rebroadcast content sent from New York or Los Angeles, to being re-staffed with new talent broadcasting new and more relevant content.

This rather long anecdote is meant only to describe how the loss of local and regional regulations on protecting content is not necessarily destructive in the medium- to long-term.  In fact, with distribution of audiovisual content now easier than it has been at any point in the history of the world, producers of high-quality regionally or linguistically specific content, distributed by aggressive entrepreneurs, could have potentially significant opportunities in a de-regulated trans-Atlantic marketplace.  With substantial French-speaking populations in Maine and Louisiana, with substantial Polish-speaking populations in Pennsylvania and Illinois, with substantial German-speaking populations in Wisconsin and Texas, and even with a substantial Slovene-speaking population in Ohio, the United States has a large and mostly untouched consumer base for niche non-English European-produced audiovisual content.

Deregulation on the scale of what is being discussed with T-TIP can potentially be very disruptive to well-established patterns of producer and consumer behavior.  However, with its growing entrepreneurial spirit, and with the incredible creativity and innovation of its culturally and linguistically diverse products, the European Union has more to gain -- in terms of new opportunities for growth through increased investment from and expanded trade with the United States -- than it has to lose, in terms of protected industries having to face new competition.

For more information on how Geyer Global Partners can help your business to "Go Global," visit our website at www.geyerglobal.de.

---

[i] United States-European Union High Level Working Group on Jobs and Growth.  “Final Report:  High Level Working Group on Jobs and Growth.”  February 11, 2013.

[ii] Office of the United States Trade Representative.  “European Union,” http://www.ustr.gov.

[iii] Office of the United States Trade Representative.  “European Union,” http://www.ustr.gov.

[iv] European Commission. “Audiovisual and Media Policies.”  http://www.ec.europa.eu.   April 12, 2012.

[v] Swedish Agency for Growth Policy Analysis.  “The Economic Effects of the Regulatory Burden.”  Growth Analysis: Östersund, 2010.