The news:
The Polish city of Sosnowiec launched a campaign to encourage tourists from the French cities of Roubaix and Les Meraux, and Morocco’s Casablanca to visit the city. The campaign ran both on and offline and featured two young, attractive models seen to be gesturing in a positive way. The gestures, unlike in Poland where they have positive connotations, are highly offensive and can be considered sexually abusive in the Mediterranean and some Arab countries.
Behind the news:
Gestures are powerful communicators which sometimes seem universal, unrelated to language. After all, apes use them too!
But as we all now know thanks to the iconic HSBC “world’s local bank” campaign, gestures actually have different, very specific meanings in different places – an endless source of miscommunication, amusement and despair for the world traveller as well as global brands.
There are no dictionaries we know of that fully describe the meanings of cultural gestures, although Desmond Morris, a British anthropologist, had a go at it. He spent a year watching and filming Italians, and categorized each one with a drawing and a meaning. He also found that the amount of gesturing varies significantly from one culture to another, concluding that Italians use more specific gestures than any other people around the world.
Thank you! You often write very interesting articles. You improved my mood.
I myself am guilty of thanking the waiter in Brazil by giving him the same “A-Ok” sign used in the ad.
Luckily my Brazilian husband was nearby to apologize for my gaff, so that we would be served the rest of our meal!
I still recall going to an art exhibit that featured an 8 ft tall hand in a variation of the US “okay” gesture (with the remaining fingers close together). It was done by an Indian artist as the ultimate tribute to Peace, the meaning of the hand gesture in India.
While individuals can easily make mistakes and hopefully have the charm to recover, it’s always surprising that advertising companies engaged in international advertising don’t think to check things out in the destination country, before launching!
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