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When the soft drink behemoth and branding superpower Coca-Cola decided to open up its market to a fifth of the world's population in China near the end of the 1920s, a problem arose. The Coke execs wanted to maintain the pronunciation of the brand so that customers would ask for a "Coca-Cola" just as they do in English-speaking countries. But when Chinese shopkeepers created their own signs to promote the beverage, putting together a string of Mandarin characters that were pronounced "ko-ka-ko-la," the characters they used meant something completely incomprehensible. Instead of promoting Coca-Cola, they really advertised what translated to "female horse fastened with wax," "wax-flattened mare," or, my favorite, "bite the wax tadpole." I don't know about you, but nothing sounds more refreshing to me than a tall glass of "bite the wax tadpole!"1
Those names certainly would not do, so Coke execs sorted through 40,000 Mandarin characters - two hundred of which were suitable for the sounds they were trying to produce. Still, nothing quite represented a beverage one would want to drink. So they compromised and chose "lé" instead of the troublesome "la" sound to create the genius .... The new phrase sounded like "Coca-Cola" and meant "to allow the mouth to be able to rejoice." One can imagine how sales were affected when stores began marketing "happy taste buds" instead of a "wax-flattened mare."
This story shows how Coke marketing execs overcame the language barrier between English and Chinese and got everyone on the same page - if only for the sake of selling a few million bottles of brown carbonated liquid. While urban legend tells a different story, claiming egocentric Coca-Cola marketers pushed the nonsensical phrases above (instead of the Chinese shopkeepers who were actually responsible), the execs did in fact realize that the word "Coca-Cola" didn't quite convey the same idea in Chinese, so they took great pains to find a suitable alternative and make sure their meaning was not being confused.
The Coke marketing genius seems to be one of a kind, but most of us fail to realize that situations similar to the Coke problem arise in our lives every day, even without the obvious language barrier. Communicating our ideas effectively...