Back in May, Starbucks Korea did a promotion called Tank Day, to celebrate their reusable tumblers they call tanks. They planned it for May the 18th. People in South Korea remember May 18th as the day their military quashed a huge protest using armored vehicles in 1980, in which hundreds and possibly thousands of people died. Oops. There was immediate backlash and protests. Sure, the promotion was designed by a marketing team in a C-suite in some other country, but you'd think that someone who works for Starbucks Korea would have pointed out the blunder ahead of time. Maybe the marketing team is not used to listening to locals.
It's far from the first time global brands ended up with egg on their faces by not taking another culture into consideration. Mercedes-Benz launched in China with the name Bensi, which in Mandarin sounds like "rush to die." We know your Swedish vacuum cleaner sucks, but is that a good thing or a bad thing in English? And will machine translations and AI ensure this will happen even more? Read about these cultural screwups and more at the Conversation.
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