Textappeal Blog

When unchecked for cultural resonance, names can take on unintended meanings and damage the brand they are designed to promote.

As soon as Gazprom launched its latest name, a contraction of Nigeria and Gaz, international incredulity spread across the twittersphere.

Advertising journal Brand Republic relayed the story and created a visual designed to highlight the potential racist overtones (NIGAZ).

This is a clear case of unintended cultural risk damaging a major brand at its birth, and likely to become a classic.

LONDON ADVERTISING and Textappeal have created a ‘Global Marketing Sentiment Index’ – the first ever global survey of sentiment in the marketing community as to what stage of recession they feel their market is in.

Given the importance of marketing expenditure as a bellwether in highlighting overall economic trends, LONDON tasked Textappeal’s network of over 100 local strategic planners around the world to ask this question in their respective territories and provide feedback. The initial result of the Index is -0.3 (on a scale of -5 to +5) indicating that the decline of the world economy is seen to have slowed almost to a stop. The survey will be repeated each quarter to track movements on a local and global basis.

The Global Marketing Sentiment Index is an integral element of ‘Marketing in the Recession’ – a unique and timely global report being launched on Thursday 18th June, which analyses how brands from across the world are responding to economic pressure and further explored how we can learn from those brands which have shown resilience and inventiveness in seizing the recession as an opportunity. The report can be downloaded from www.londonadvertising.com

The report also uncovers fascinating examples of the good, the bad and the positively cringe-worthy marketing attempts from large established markets in an effort to try to survive the recession. From Volkswagen’s Satirical newspaper pull-out in Bulgaria, to KFC fixing and branding potholes in America, the report captures a kaleidoscopic variety of approaches to provide businesses with invaluable and up to-date business insight.

Whilst traditional agency networks are dusting off reports from the 70’s showing how brands that increased their marketing spend grew after the 1974 recession, Textappeal and LONDON’s view is that this simply is not an option for most companies today and they therefore endeavour to help deliver greater effectiveness from a diminished spend. This is the fundamental premise of LONDON and Textappeal’s joint value proposition: to create international advertising BETTER, FASTER, CHEAPER.