Chevy Nova and other global marketing myths
Written by ForeignExchange Translations on Sunday, June 07, 2009
Everybody loves to have a good laugh at a mistranslation.
For years, marketing "experts" have claimed that the reason the Chevy Nova failed in Spanish-speaking countries is that "no va" is Spanish for "doesn't go." But just because lots of people like telling this story doesn't make it true.
Sometimes these myths are true (as with the Electrolux example) but especially the most commonly told ones are usually false.
Just because the Nova anecdote isn't true doesn't mean that this isn't a big issue. Like GM did with the Buick LaCrosse in Canada, companies sometimes do change product names in a specific market in an effort to avoid a bad connotation. More often, companies don't change the product name, even though they should really consider it.
In addition to the excellent book Another One Bites The Grass that we mentioned recently, here are a handful of other resources that will prevent your company from becoming the next Chevy Nova story:
- The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Live and Buy as They Do
- Brand Failures: The Truth about the 100 Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time
- Classic Failures in Product Marketing: Marketing Principles Violations and How to Avoid Them
- Culture Clash: Managing the Global High-Performance Team
For expert medical translations of regulatory, clinical, and marketing content in 40 languages - including Spanish - request a detailed proposal from ForeignExchange Translations.
Sorry for the shameless self promotion. And thanks for the post.
Sorry for the shameless self-promotion.
- firstly: "Nova" is 1 word, and "No va" is two.
- secondly: I don't know Spanish, but I can imagine that in Spain the word "nova" has the same meaning as it has in English and Dutch: an exploding star (well, actually, a partly exploding star, a fully exploding star is a super nova)
When Reuters reported the Buick re-naming for the Canadian market back in October 2003, I wrote a blog post about these kind of "translation legends." In it, I quoted snopes.com on the Chevy Nova legend:
"Assuming that Spanish speakers would naturally see the word ‘nova’ as equivalent to the phrase ‘no va’ and think ‘Hey, this car doesn’t go!’ is akin to assuming that English speakers would spurn a dinette set sold under the name Notable because nobody wants a dinette set that doesn’t include a table.”