Hands off LaCrosse

Staying north of the border and south of the waistline, there’s news that GM has a new-found confidence in its marketing convictions. It concerns the Buick LaCrosse and the habits of Quebecois teenagers.

LaCrosse is a wildly popular sport in Canada. Sort of like hockey played on grass, it originated with the Native American nations of the United States and Canada, mainly among the Huron and Iroquois tribes.

So LaCrosse would seem to be a wholesome, easy-to-pronounce, action-oriented name for a vehicle. Except that it is apparently slang for masturbation in Quebec. Why the febrile teens of Quebec would refer to it as ‘la crosse’ is anyone’s guess but GM erred on the side of caution when it launched the LaCrosse in 2005. They called it the Allure in Canada.

The new GM seems to have come to its senses over this issue.  It has decided the 2010 model will be called the LaCrosse on both sides of the border.

Keep your hands where I can see them.

“It was in fact our dealers in Quebec who wanted the name changed,” George Saratlic, a GM Canada product communications spokesman, told the Canadian Press. ”They saw little down side to using the LaCrosse name in common with the U.S. and recognized the huge upside in terms of the enhanced advertising support that could be derived from the LaCrosse name and creative work done for it in the U.S.”

This is hardly the first time a carmaker has been distracted by an automotive double entendre. The Ford Pinto, the Mitsubishi Pajero, and the Mazda Laputa apparently all mean something unsavoury somewhere in South America.

As Ira Bachrach of NameLab says. “It happens all the time. You sit in a room and there’s always some guy in the back who says that means sexual perversion in Nicaragua.”

“Most companies ignore it or at the very worst they do research to see whether a), it’s generally perceived in the audience they care about and b), whether it’s relevant, whether the audience really cares.”

Which leads us to the legendary Chevy Nova story, the classic cautionary tale of the pitfalls of names in foreign markets. It goes something like this – GM launched the Chevrolet Nova into the Spanish speaking market and it bombed because ‘no va’ translates to ‘it doesn’t go’ in Spanish.

It lives on in countless marketing textbooks. It is repeated in numerous business and branding seminars and is a staple of magazine and newspaper reporters in need of a pithy example of branding folly.

A great anecdote, for sure. Except that the story is not true. Sorry. Blame Snopes.

These brand tenants should be evicted

The word ‘brand’ has been so pulverized by misuse that it has become devoid of any specific meaning. It is a verbal husk from which most of the nutrition has been extracted.

As a result, other words are frequently added to it in an attempt to inject some meaning. Thus we have Brand Core, Brand DNA, Brand Insistence, Brand Momentum, Brand Physique and Brand Science, to mention just a few notable examples of the genre.

I came across a new one recently.

A presenter from a research company of international repute was earnestly discussing the “brand tenants” of a company to a group of its senior executives. No, I did not hear incorrectly; there it was emblazoned on the screen:

BRAND TENANTS.

These ‘tenants’ included words such as ‘innovative’ and ‘trusted’ with supporting verbiage. No one blinked, not an eyebrow was raised.

In search of brand tenants

It had me guessing for a while before I realized she meant ‘tenets’.

While tenet and tenant share the same root tenere (to hold) they mean totally different things. A tenant is a person that pays rent to use or occupy land or a building owned by another; a tenet is an opinion, doctrine, or principle held as being true by a person or especially by an organization (it says so in the dictionary).

Brand tenets, however wearisome the verbal concoction, makes some sense. Meanwhile, those company executives in the meeting are presumably quite content to believe they have brand tenants. Which is OK, as long as they don’t expect to collect rent from them.

Time Warner’s naming twavails

When it comes to name changes, the Time Warner organization has had its share of unfortunate events.

The merger with AOL produced the misbegotten AOL Time Warner for a brief period before Time Warner executives regained their composure senses and dropped AOL from the corporate name. In this case the name was the least of Time Warner’s problems, however unlovely and humiliating it may have been. Its offspring, Time Warner Telecom, made much heavier weather of its naming challenge.

The entrepreuner’s naming trap 2: Lack of due diligence

Financial advisor Sid Blum had been running his own firm, GreenLight Fee Only Advisors, for more than three years when in April he received a threatening legal letter from Greenlight Capital Inc., the hedge fund led by legendary short-seller David Einhorn.

The letter ordered Mr. Blum to stop using the GreenLight name. The hedge fund followed up by filing a lawsuit in May.

The entrepreuner’s naming trap 1: Product specificity

What has the Starbucks name got to do with coffee? Absolutely nothing.

Starbuck, the character in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick after whom the coffee chain is named did not drink a drop of coffee. Starbucks is a brand forged around  founder Howard Schultz’s vision of recreating the Italian coffee bar culture in the US, not the generic product.

“Customers must recognize that you stand for something”, he once said.