Our Logo Looks Like Underpants: A Case Study in Internationalization | Hacker News Reader

Our Logo Looks Like Underpants: A Case Study in Internationalization

blog.rjmetrics.com

161 pointsColinWright75 comments

"There is no excuse for not testing something as significant as a new logo on a large, global audience"

There is one excuse. When you are small it makes more sense to ship something and fix it later, than invest time and money in surveying everything. Especially if your "market research " won't be done on a property representative group anyway.

Edit: it's an interesting read though.

Like Nike for instance!

Does their logo mean something in some part of the world?

I don't suppose so. But it was not tested on any group whatsoever. At least according to the urban legend. It was dashed off by a designer for $50 and became a worldwide phenomenon.

Conversely, Nike is also responsible for the infamous "Allah/Air shoes" that caused a shitstorm in the late 90s.

For those wondering:

> What makes the Nike Air Bakin’ such a sizzling story is the controversy that arose from the fiery logo on the heel; it was the word ‘Air’ designed in a fiery motif, but backlash from the Muslim community for its slight resemblance to ‘Allah’ in Arabic text forced Nike to recall the shoes and re-release with a basic Nike Air logo.

http://sneakernews.com/2012/09/28/classics-revisited-nike-ai...

The rest of the marketing was on point as well, which led to the worldwide phenomenon. Just do it is a powerful phrase. Its short, distinct, and appeals to a our basic instincts. Its was a meme before we were inudated with memes.

Here in Poland many people call it an "ice-skate". Nike doesn't seem to be much excited about it. People always have some associations and are eager to make some jokes to impress others with their wit. It's inevitable.

According to their data, only 2.6% of Brits thought the logo looked like underwear, anyway. It's OK if a small proportion of your users think your logo looks stupid. Obviously, it's nice to avoid it, but this is hardly the disaster that's implied by "there is no excuse."

What's odd is in the first tweet they show their logo really does look like underpants. But, the logo is different in the next 2 images. It's rotated 180 deg. After it's rotated it really doesn't look like underpants.

Reminds me of the reaction to Apple's naming of the iPad. Like, "My Tampon?" Ha-Ha-Ha. Big huge deal. Surely they'll rename it. What a horrible name.

But now it doesn't occur to anyone to make that association.

Great example. I recall seeing a lot of people saying things like that at the time. Doesn't seem to have had any consequences.

I was one of the people lampooning Nintendo for the Wii. "Wee" being a very common britishism for "pee".

(e.g. "I want a wii in the corner of my living room!" fnar fnar.)

I figured they'd change it before launch. The joke was stared down by the brand, and the brand won. What do I know?

When the Washington NBA team changed from the Bullets to the Wizards, a common potential problem brought up was that people would call them the Wiz (similar connotation to wee).

The MLS team in Kansas City was initially (in 1996) actually named the 'Kansas City Wiz.' It was later changed to Wizards (and later still totally renamed after changing ownership hands). Their games against the (also since renamed) Dallas Burn generated a lot of childish jokes, as you might expect.

Ah, the amplifying effect of Twitter.

That's actually the problem we're working to solve at Survata: fast, reliable, and affordable market research.

You aren't the only one. Frank Purdue, of Perdue Farms, used to have the slogan "It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken", but managed to get it terribly mangled when translating it into Spanish. It became "It takes a hard man to get a chicken aroused".

I wouldn't feel too bad. Not much tops that.

Also in Spain, Vauxhall motors tried to sell the Nova model which was popular in the UK.

... until someone local pointed out that 'nova' means 'doesn't go' in Spanish (roughly).

In appears this isn't actually the case, it was an Opel Corsa from the start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Chevy_II_/_Nova#Urba...

All right. I guess I've got to up my game. The Office of Government Control (OGC) in the UK spent quite a lot of money on a new logo.

Once it was put on a mouse mat, they pulled it pretty quickly.

The logo:

http://lh5.ggpht.com/_hVfE2qcyzXU/TMrokymnKiI/AAAAAAAAA4I/PN...

The UK's Telegraph covered it pretty well:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1901656/OGC-unveils-new-logo...

There have been quite a few car name mishaps though:

* Mazda Laputa - 'the whore' in Spanish

* Buick LaCrosse - slang for masturbation in Canada (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3208501.stm)

* Kia Provo - nickname for the IRA (an Irish terrorist group) (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-21678741)

* And Ford Pinto - Brazilian slang for 'penis'

My favorite car name mishap doesn't even involve i18n.

Hyundai Sonata was introduced in 1985 and was a reasonably popular model...

...until the next year someone realized that "sona ta" is a Korean expression meaning "Only a cow would ride that."

In Korean characters, the car is now spelled "Ssonata".

I'm surprised they didn't just rename it the Buick Lacrosse, after Canada's official sport.

It appears the Mazda was never sold outside Japan and the Kia was only a concept vehicle. Additionally the Buick is now called LaCrosse in Canada. So probably not as impactful as it might seem...

> Mazda Laputa - 'the whore' in Spanish

Laputa is not "the whore" in Spanish. "La puta" is "the whore" in Spanish, but its not pronounced the same as "Laputa" would be, and is as distinct from it as many other pairs of words (or, in this case, pairs of things where one is a word and one is a phrase) with very different meanings are in Spanish.

According to the WP article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laputa it's close enough that various Spanish-language editions of Gulliver's Travels have altered the word to something else (though a citation is lacking). (It's almost certain that Swift was fully aware of the meaning, by the way, especially since we can be sure that he'd read the Apocalypse of John.)

The sad reality is that nobody cares in spanish speaking countries how is pronounced in other countries, specially when you are using Newspapers and Posters to reach your target. And the subsequent try to fix it leads to a pedantic "It's Frankensteen effect" that is even worse. Lots of companies fall in this trap all the time. "Laputa" and "La puta" are the same for a spanish speaker.

Good luck trying to convince women or young couples to buy a car with something not much different to "madge theprostitute" written in fancy letters on a side. Or telling your clients that drive "thebitch" is more safe, or that refill "thewhore" deposit is cheaper and there is capacity for lots of people and tools.

"Puta" is a complicated word in spanish that not always have negative connotations, but is too colloquial, never elegant, and a big minefield for non spanish speakers. In this case it almost worked... but not. Is not even funny. Is a huge and really strange marketing mistake.

The car in question was a kei car not sold outside Japan, so "huge and really strange marketing mistake" might be overstating the actual effect a bit. It's not like it would have had Corolla-like sales with a different name.

Lots of words mean strange things in other languages, most of the time it's not really an issue.

The name of the German lightbulb brand Osram, sold in Poland under the same name, literally means "I will shit on it" in Polish. Doesn't seem to have impacted sales much. Occasionally kids will have a giggle.

http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp

Similarly, Mitsubishi's Pajero means "wanker" in Argentina and other Latin American countries, which is why they renamed it to Montero in those locations.

The vehicle was called the Montero in the US back when they sold it here.

I had a Pajero Jr. for a while in Uganda, great small SUV. Had no idea I was driving a little wanker.

One of my top 10 must go to tourist destinations:

http://wankerscorner.com/

Just for the laughs.

There's quite a famous hotel in Krakow, Poland, which used to be called "Boner Palace":

https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/194/529341550_1a979f8746_z.jpg...

But after English-speaking tourists pointed out what "Boner" means the name was quickly changed to an adjective in Polish, hence "Bonerowski Palac": https://alucockabroad.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/dscn2157.j...

At my last job we had a message shown when a certain view was empty that said something along the lines of:

"Bummer, you don't appear to have any messages"

We got a very very angry message from a user one day, telling us they didn't appreciate us using the word "bummer" and that it was extremely offensive. Apparently it's a slang term in the UK.

Internationalization is tough :\

I'm from the UK and I've only ever seen "Bummer" as a mild disappointment. That one person was probably just looking for things to complain about.

I'm also from the UK and I've definitely heard it used as a derogatory term towards gay men or to try and put someone down by implying that they're gay.

A "bummer" is a slang term for a gay man. I haven't heard that for about 30 years. I wouldn't have linked the two meanings until the controversy was mentioned.

I think the consensus we reached was it was a much older bit of slang and mostly localized to a specific region, although it was tough for us to confirm.

I haven't ever heard it used in that derogatory sense - but I've always been under the impression that that was the etymology. (Also British).

Just as other words, e.g. referring to illegitimate children (I think even medical doctors no longer use it) are used differently to their original meaning. The meaning of most slang/swear words are - ahem - bastardised, if you will.

You'll get complaints no matter what. 16 years ago I created a website for a large insurance company. When a customer signed up for policyholder functions it generated a random password for the person to use initially in the format of consonant, vowel, vowel, consonant then four numbers.

We got a nasty email from someone who got the password DUUD7573. They were insulted as a pre-operative transsexual that we were calling them a "dude" and that we must've known they were a transsexual.

On his blog, Raymond Chen mentions how Windows' random choice of user pic offended some people. Apparently some Asian user got the karate pic, and decided it was picked on purpose for him, instead of at random.

The best way to handle this is say "No, it's at random." and let people un-offend themselves.

As a person that never gets offended, I wonder whether I should get my head checked. There are so many things I could get offended by!

You should have explained that the word is completely innocent, like in "bum a fag".

I have the reverse problem at my company. Our Australian cofounder was in charge of picking the logo, so he picked an emu, a bird native to Australia. So now people always ask us why our logo is an ostrich, so I have to point out that emus have three toes and ostriches have two (a fact that I only learned when I asked our cofounder why we had an ostrich in the logo, that should have been my clue).

Would you say you're just "burying your head in the sand" on this issue?

Well see that's what everyone says when they think it's an ostrich! But emus don't do that. :)

Ostriches don't either :p

You can't even see the toes in the top logo (http://cloudnative.io/statics/theme/cloudnative-logo-black.p...)

The only way I noticed was this image further down the homepage where you can see the toes (http://cloudnative.io/statics/theme/ecosystem.png).

So what was the reason why you have an emu in the logo then? :)

I wonder who wrote the survey question [and why] - "What object does this look like?". Underpants aren't considered to be an object, hence they score low; the question "What does this logo remind you of?" would perhaps fair quite differently.

Why the passive voice--who doesn't consider underpants to be an object? I think they are an object, as are most discrete solids (a rock is an object, dirt is not; underpants are an object, water in a cup is not an object, but the cup is).

Yes, of course strictly, scientifically, speaking they are an object. But people don't talk about underpants as an object. Particularly with the weird plural-like singular.

Similarly if you asked "What item ..." in UK English at least we talk about "items of clothing" rather than "clothing objects" and so the question starting "What item" is far more likely to get an item of clothing as a response. "What does this remind you of?" is less leading.

I'm tempted in to a diatribe on the epistemological bounds of the category of things that constitute "objects" but it would probably be less than edifying for the rest of you so I'll keep it to myself!

I can't mention the company or product name, but here's a funny story:

Back in the 90s I worked for a firm that had a really cool terminal emulation product. Because of the name of the product, the marketing department came up with this great picture for the front of the box that the software came in - It was a couple of retro-looking soldiers standing side-by-side, shielding their eyes from the sun with one hand. The packaging was awesome, and everyone thought it was great. We were all set to release it, when one of our partners in Germany said "Holy (Bleep)! You can't sell this here in Germany - the front of the box looks like a couple of nazis saluting hitler!"

Back to the drawing board for the marketing guys, ha ha.

The fact that it took a German to identify that is alarming.

Clearly you've never worked in marketing.

The fact that we often care more about the symbols used by the Nazis than their politics is what's really alarming.

There's a lot of scope for this sort of thing with twitter hashtags, one of the best being a hash tag for Susan Boyle's Album Party getting shortened to: #Susanalbumparty http://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2012/nov/22/...

This post is 2 years old, but it looks like at some point they reverted to their original underpants logo, except rotated by 180 degrees.

That's what they say in the article! They also changed the white lines.

If you look in the upper right of the page, you can see RJMetrics current logo, which is the original logo but with a right-side up Y, not the one shown at the end of the article.

Oh. I stand corrected! Sorry about that.

It's funny that you see it as flipped upside down. I see it as flipped left and right. In terms of whether the Y is up or down, neither of them are, but the original one had it leaning right, and the one currently on their page has it leaning left.

Perception.

It seems to have changed again; IMO looks more like y-fronts than ever..

(2013)

If that logo looks like underwear. What does the ycombinator logo look like?

To me, it looks like a partially-unzipped zipper.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6521138

Fun read! Reminded me of when the company my father was working for merged with an American one (my family growing up in the UK), he brought back some t-shirts and a tennis hat/visor thing, all reading PMT!

"It appears that y-fronts are a uniquely British phenomenon whose popularity doesn’t extend far past their borders."

Sad to note that they didn't survey India!

It's just a bad logo. And why did they not use their Twitter avatar in their Google consumer survey? The image they used does not look like underpants.

I see no underwear - I see a Dodecahedron. But anyway - like on most situations, people will see what they want to see.

Well, as soon as you see underwear and notice it doesn't make sense, you should be looking for an alternative explanation anyway.

The term y-fronts is also used in Australia (the article mentions UK only usage). I think of them as old fashioned, but that may be my own interpretation.

I put together some slang definitions for a Quiz Night earlier this year. I noticed Australia has a lot more in common with the UK than the US when it comes to slang. This may change with the Internet in the next decade or so.

Unless we become a republic, I don't think we will. We are a hell of a lot more cynical and reserved as a rule. And whilst we really love American culture, we see a LOT of stuff coming out of the U.S. a good proportion of the nation shake our heads at - like the insane U.S. gun culture and absurd health care system. That tends to blunt U.S. influence a great deal. Not to mention we have Australuan citizens who we know are being or have been persecuted by the U.S., like David Hicks and Julian Assange.

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