WEIRD LATIN AMERICA BRANDING

August 24, 2017 SouthAmerica

Today in South America to the World:

In South America countries it is not uncommon to Brand products using a combination of English words to make an exotic or fancy sounding name. This does not always work out with the best of results! Other examples come from Spanish words that have cognate spelling to other English names causing further confusion.

In this post we highlight a few of the classics with photographs. The absolute worst case came from a menu in the mining city of Calama in Chile. An upscale steakhouse had English translations beneath the rather long descriptions of the plates that attempted to make the meal sound like elegant cuisine. This went horribly wrong. A group of us were dining that night, and the laughter that erupted left the older waiters dumbfounded.

One of the steaks had listed in the translation that it was “bathed in lotion of…” well, this last word is a term for male reproductive fluids, without further explanation needed. Less intense, but equally off-kilter at a Cusco restaurant, they were serving “Andean Chicken of Love.”

Chocolate chip cookies in Chile, branded as “Nutkiss”, a clothing store in Punta del Este in Uruguay called “Tits”, a shopping mall in Colombia serving “Doopies”, and a food truck hot dog vendor in Copiapo, Chile with sandwiches called “Ass Gigante.” Chile has a series of beverages with names that cause pause, such as Pap, Sprim, Yuz, Kem, and Bilz. Or toilet paper called Confort, which actually is not a bad idea in practice! Chile has a canned tuna product called “Fanny,” think about it, canned Fanny! Really? Fanny picture contribution of Quinn Smith.

The example have been so numerous over the years that we wished we had kept track of more of them, but you get the idea, you never know what to expect with weird Latin America branding.