An excerpt from my diary of a global Traveler
I have come to learn over the years that words can be powerful, beautiful and rich with both knowledge and emotions. But they can also be the source of devastating miscommunication. It is commonly said among communications experts that meaning is in people, not in the words themselves. Each of us interprets the words we hear somewhat differently. Imagine when words flow from and/or too people not using their native language. It sometimes leaves us wondering:
· When is a yes a yes and a no a no?
· Should a polite complaint be seen as a serious issue?
· When is that which is not said more important than what is said?
Over the years I have collected examples from the advertising industry where a failure to recognize the cultural implications of words and pictures have resulted in huge embarrassments for otherwise highly reputable companies. Here are a few of my favorites.
The Electrolux company, a Swedish manufacturer of vacuum cleaners, developed an ad campaign in their own language to promote the suction power of their vacuum cleaners. When the local ad agency was charged with producing magazine ads, billboards, etc. for the English-speaking markets, the results were not what was expected. The ads ran with the slogan “Nothing sucks like Electrolux”.
The US manufacturer of personal care products Clairol had a very successful hair curler which allowed a tube to be filled with water. When entwined with long hair and plugged into an electric outlet, a fine mist was released through the hair giving it a springy curl. Clairol decided to introduce it into the German market using the English language name: the Mist Stick. Unfortunately, the word “mist” in German is slang for excrement.
Gerber is the world’s largest producer of strained baby foods sold in small jars. Their brand is easily recognized by the close-up picture of around faced baby on the front of each jar. Following the end of apartheid in South Africa, Gerber decided to enter the market and in South Africa to sell their products with a picture of a black baby rather than their traditional white one. They were totally confused by the shock and outrage of the local people until someone explained that because of the illiteracy rates resulting from poor educational opportunities that existed in South Africa, it was traditional to place a photograph of what was contained in the package on the front.
General Motors manufactured a car in the United States called the Chevrolet Nova. When they wanted to expand their market into Mexico, the car’s name caused many people to laugh since in the Spanish language no va means “doesn’t go”.
The German pharmaceutical company Bayer wanted to market their aspirin in the Middle East. Recognizing a variety of languages and the significant illiteracy rate, they hit upon the idea of using a large cartoon in three panels on billboards. In the leftmost panel you see a person in distress holding their head. In the middle panel they take a Bayer aspirin. In the right panel they are happy and smiling. It sounds good except for one thing: throughout the Middle East people read from right to left suggesting that you can take this pill if you want to give yourself a headache.
The American Dairy Association’s campaign “Got Milk” didn’t work so well in Mexico where it translated into “are you lactating?”.
KFC is ad campaign “Finger lickin’ good” turned out in China to say “We’ll eat your fingers off”.
Another chicken producer in America, Perdue, used to the slogan “it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken”. In Mexico that turned out as “it takes a hard man to arouse a chicken”.
Pepsi had its share of problems in China with the slogan “Come alive with Pepsi!” which translated to “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead”.
The American beer producer Coors had the slogan “Turn it loose” which in Spanish translated to “Suffer from diarrhea”.
The seemingly innocuous slogan of Ford “Every car has a high quality body” in Belgium meant “Every car has a high quality corpse”.
Schweppes tonic water in Italian turns into Schweppes toilet water.
The list is endless and occurs not only in advertising. Day-to-day negotiations, contracts and communications of all kind often fail to produce the desired results because the intended message was not received.
A word to the Natives: You may have heard someone say, “Most of the world does business in bad English”. We can thank the Irish writer Oscar Wilde for coining it. It is true that when a Korean and a Brazilian discuss business, they will most likely use English, which is the native language of neither of them. American English in particular has evolved with a minimum of grammar rules. When the American writer Mark Twain was learning German, he lamented that life was too short to learn the German language. He was overwhelmed by learning masculine, feminine or neutral articles for every noun as well as the four cases – nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. Hungarian has several more cases!
So if you are a native speaker of English or someone who has mastered the language to near-native competence you have an obligation to help those who must try to keep up with you. Here are a few basic but important tips that will see that nobody gets lost in the discussion.
Keep meetings short and have frequent breaks so that overtaxed brains having to translate what the native speakers say have a chance to rest.
Summarize frequently.
Encourage questions.
Do your best to remove slang from your remarks. English benefits from these colorful expressions, but not during a meeting with non-native speakers.
Slow your delivery down slightly and be careful to pronounce each word correctly and fully. Someone from New Jersey may be able to figure out what you mean if you say “D’jeet jet?” but to make sure everybody understands say “Did you eat yet?”.
Acronyms are fine if everybody understands them. If not, they will only make some people feel left out and confused.
Use AV support judiciously to clarify key words and points. Don’t fill your PowerPoints with every word you are going to say. Stick to key words, phrases and images which “speak a thousand words”.
Offer hands-on or small group sessions where those who may be shy or need a little longer to process ideas can catch up.
To this last point, I would like to relay an experience I had explaining Edward de Bono’s wonderful concept of the “Six Thinking Hats”. It happened that I had neither a PowerPoint nor a flipchart available. But the concept is clear enough that I felt I would not have a problem conveying the message. At the break one of my German seminar participants came up to me and said he liked the concept very much, but he didn’t understand why it was called the “Sick Stinking Hats”. I should have slowed down some more.
I think our modern cacophonic world has left us awash in a sea of words and sounds with the consequence that listening skills are poorer than ever. People try to multitask and end up not fully concentrating on anything. We have a culture of trying to win disagreements instead of reaching understanding or possibly even consensus. When another person is speaking, we often seem to use most of our brainpower to think up better arguments instead of listening carefully in order to understand what the other person means. To borrow a lovely idea from a training video produced by John Cleese on coaching, “True listening means making your mind quiet so that the words of the other person get through to you”.
I have frequently conducted an exercise in training programs to show how just doing that totally changes the dialog. I pair people up and ask them to identify a controversial topic about which they have totally opposite views and feel passionate about. This should be grounds for a real argument. But then I used the technique of a controlled dialog – one person makes a short statement about his or her viewpoint. Then the other must paraphrase everything the first person said before adding their rebuttal. This continues with each person summarizing what the other one last said.
To the surprise of the participants, there is no aggressiveness or shouting and people often say that they understand for the first time how someone could hold that opinion which is diametrically opposed to theirs.
We long to know that we are heard and understood. So in normal business conversation I urge the use of restatement when something potentially important has been said. The listener responds with something like “Let me make sure I understand your proposal. You said that ….” The original speaker either confirms or corrects and the 360° loop has been completed. That doesn’t mean there is agreement, but there is common understanding.
If you are the proposer and the listener does not offer to make a restatement, you can say, “Just to make sure I expressed myself clearly, would you please restate what I just said?”
Herb
Side-note: The title of this post comes from the line “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate” spoken in the film Cool Hand Luke.