BLUNDERS IN INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS

 

Blunders in international business is a book written by David Ricks.

Do you think that big organizations make mistakes while they do business, yes sometimes they do. Some of the interesting blunders by organization are discussed in this blog.

 

1-SCHWEPPES

 

Schweppes is a beverage brand which is originated in the Republic of Geneva. First it only manufacturers soda water, today various drinks other than soda water bear the Schweppes brand name, including various types of lemonade and ginger ales. The blunder by Schweppes is that , when they launched a campaign in Italy, they didn’t take into account that '' ill water’ ‘means toilet water in Italy. The company naturally don’t want to sell toilet water and changed its name to Schweppes Tonica.

 

2-FORD FIERA

 

Ford is an American multinational automobile manufacturer. the company is founded by Henry Ford.

Fiera is low-cost model truck introduced by Ford into some of the less developed countries. In many parts of the world the sales go extremely well, but the sales was poor in Spanish speaking countries. The Ford want to know the reason behind the poor sales and they had founded that the name FIERA was the problem. Fiera means old ugly women in Spanish. I also may not be interested to drive a truck which means old and ugly.

 

3-NESTLE GERBER

Nestle is a Swiss multinational food and drink processing conglomerate corporation headquartered in Vevey, Switzerland.

Gerber is food product by Nestle, which contains fruit paste for babies. Fruits are processed into an easily digestible pate in a small bottle. The brand became so popular and nestle had decided to launch Gerber in African countries. Most of the people in Africa did not know to read English and they depends on the picture of the product to understand what it contains. Gerber has an image of a baby in the bottle , so the Africans  think that it contains babies in a paste form . The brand miserably failed to sell this product and later realized that, it was the reason.

 

4- PEPSICO AND CHINA

 

PepsiCo made a blunder when they attempted to translate their famous slogan ''Come Alive With The Pepsi'' to Chinese during the 1980s. When this was translated it came out as ‘'Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave''. Assume that if the company able to do so , the population of China would have doubled.

 

5-SONY ACCUSED FOR RACISM

 

In 2006, Sony were forced to pull a Dutch billboard campaign promoting their white PlayStation console  following accusations of racism. In the adverts a white women wearing white dress and a black women wearing black dress were shown in confrontational poses. Complaints flooded quickly in and Sony withdraw all of the posters.