Don’t get left behind! Catch up on the Devangelical 11-Step Survival Guide first:
* Intro
* Step 1: Admit It, You’ve Got Issues
* Step 2: Sanity Is An Option…Right?
* Step 3: Make a Choice to Get Over It, Why Don’t You?
* Step 4: Make a List
* Step 5: Share Your List, or Why I Love Whores
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Devangelist Erika Rae has been impregnated by her mistakes. No wait...
Step #6: We are willing to forgive ourselves and move on.
Here is a list of some of the most embarrassing marketing mistakes, which I unabashedly stole from elsewhere on the Web:
1. Coors put its slogan, “Turn it loose,” into Spanish where it was read as “Suffer from diarrhea.”
2. Scandinavian vacuum manufacturer Electrolux used the following in an American campaign: Nothing sucks like an Electrolux.
3. Clairol introduced the “Mist Stick”, a curling iron, into German only to find out that “mist” is slang for manure. Not too many people had use for the “manure stick.”
4. When Gerber started selling baby food in Africa, they used the same packaging as in the US, with the beautiful Caucasian baby on the label. Later they learned that in Africa, companies routinely put pictures on the label of what’s inside, since most people can’t read.
5. Colgate introduced a toothpaste in France called Cue, the name of a notorious porno magazine.
6. An American T-shirt maker in Miami printed shirts for the Spanish market which promoted the Pope’s visit. Instead of “I saw the Pope” (el papa), the shirts read “I saw the potato” (la papa).
7. Pepsi’s “Come alive with the Pepsi Generation” translated into “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave”, in Chinese.
8. Frank Perdue’s chicken slogan, “it takes a strong man to make a tender chicken” was translated into Spanish as “it takes an aroused man to make a chicken affectionate.”
9. The Coca-Cola name in China was first read as “Ke-kou-ke-la”, meaning “Bite the wax tadpole” or “female horse stuffed with wax”, depending on the dialect. Coke then researched 40,000 characters to find a phonetic equivalent “ko-kou-ko-le”, translating into “happiness in the mouth.”
10. In Mexico, after a year of awful sales Chevrolet discovered back in the 1970s that “Nova” the name of a popular car in the USA in Spanish means “does not go.”
11. When Parker Pen marketed a ball-point pen in Mexico, its ads were supposed to have read, “it won’t leak in your pocket and embarrass you.” Instead, the company thought that the word “embarazar” (to impregnate) meant to embarrass, so the ad read: “It won’t leak in your pocket and make you pregnant.”
As crappy as it sounds (and probably is), few things in life make a person feel better about one’s own life than reading about other people’s screw-ups. And especially when a large company is involved. Why? Because not just one person made the mistake. It was spawned and discussed and approved by entire wings of corporations with an enormous rubber stamp, and possibly several. Which means that when the mistake is finally realized, there is a lot of hiding out in the bathroom at the company picnic.
Here’s what else I love about this list (which, admittedly, has circulated the web for awhile, but still makes me giggle, nonetheless). It’s all about cross-cultural mishaps. It’s about how one group of people made an assumption about another group of people and ended up getting serious egg on their face.
Religious cultures aren’t all that different than corporations, really. Both are made up of good and bad people. Both are made up of people with their own cultures and understanding about other cultures. Both are trying to relate and communicate to an outside world that it does not necessarily understand. And, just like the corporation trying to sell a product to an outside culture, things get lost in translation in the midst of the zeal.
Maybe the marketing was off before it got to you. Maybe you were a vital component of “turning it loose” on others. Either way, it’s OK. It happens. Mel Brooks once said that “As long as the world is turning and spinning, we’re gonna be dizzy and we’re gonna make mistakes.”
Step 6 of the Devangelical 11-Step Recovery Guide is about being willing to forgive yourself and move on. And I suppose the key thing about this step is not so much the actual forgiveness, but the willingness to forgive. So, maybe you did some just plain batshit crazy things in the name of religion once upon a time. Doesn’t it make you feel just a little better to know that you’re not alone?