- Crypto company (which is terrible but that's another kettle of fish) chooses the name Aave/AAVE for their currency. - Americans get ahold of it, lots of flailing about how, obviously, there were no black people in the room when the name was choosen.
I mean, yes. Kneejerk reaction was, "Uh, that's already in use for other reasons." Then I found out the company is Finnish and I'm like, "Okay, no, that makes sense."
i can understand the initial knee jerk reaction of "why would you name it that?" but then when you find out that it's a foreign company, and that is a word in their language... why keep going?
Okay genuinely though if you're going to launch a company you need to check what your company's name means in other languages. I usually see this when American companies pick a cool word that turns out to mean something else in other countries but that doesn't make it any better in reverse?
That's true -- one of my lines of work is precisely aiding in that process, to make sure product names don't involve some implications that won't be convenient or detract from the product in some way
Either they 1) didn't care that it could be a problem and didn't check at all or 2) decided after a 5 second google that they didn't care and either way it's not a great choice to make for branding.
a japanese car company once had to rename an entire model line because they didn't realize that the word they picked meant something along the lines of "never fucking works" or "explodes a lot" or 'useless" in Spanish... and they were trying to market it in Mexico....
But, also. Google can only help so much because of localization of results. If it's an actual word in your country and you Google it, you're not going to get meanings elsewhere for several ages.
But going after a company in an entirely different country because they're using an actual word in their own language that happens to be spelled the same as an acronym in another country that they had no reason to really know about is...not necessarily a good look for Americans.
The former usually has many other questions to answer, so I imagine finding all connotations is more expensive than just focusing on the offensive ones
the comparison i saw was that spanish speakers wouldn't read "nova" as "doesn't go" any more than english speakers would think a kitchen set called "notable" didn't come with a table
Heard one once about an auto maker almost naming an engine a word that means toilet in another language but it was in a tv documentary a very long time ago so I don't remember.
- Americans get ahold of it, lots of flailing about how, obviously, there were no black people in the room when the name was choosen.
I usually see this when American companies pick a cool word that turns out to mean something else in other countries but that doesn't make it any better in reverse?
An individual and not a crypto startup