Financial & Travel Musings

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Not so long ago you saw them everywhere, didn’t you? Nowadays, the funny t-shirt seems almost like a dying breed which is a shame I think.

OK, sometimes funny t shirts were offensive to some, often rude and always with an irrereverant sense of humour. But, hey, isn’t all humour like that? The plain-Jane approach to humour doesn’t work for the most part: by and large, we need something that little bit off-colour to bring a smile.

So why not hunt an appealing one down and make a point of being different from the crowd?

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I’ll have to confess that I’m one of those people who pretty much strip the stands at trade shows of all the especially cute little give-aways that they have.

You’d think that I’d long since have overdosed on promotional pens but surprisingly there are still cute ones around. I pity one company that I went to last year though as they’d made their pens just too cute and just about everyone was collecting those ones which was just a pure cost to that company as I’ve no idea what they do and there’s neither a phone number not website address on the pen so I can’t even find out.

That’s, of course, the problem with give-aways: people who have no interest in your products will collect them if they’re unusual enough. That’s presumably why you no longer see the stress balls out these days as they’re 1) relatively expensive as give-aways 2) great freebie gifts for your kids and 3) the ink rubs off them pretty quickly so their value as a promotional item is extremely limited.

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When a British company is trying to sell overseas for the first time, the first market that they tend to look towards is in America simply because of the common language and, of course, the reverse applies too.

However, it’s not quite a common language and one of the things that these companies often forget is that their product documentation and website often need to be translated into the appropriate version of English. Unfortunately, that’s far from an obvious thought as the familiarity we each have for the other’s dialect often means that we’re almost completely unaware of the differences.

Take a few simple examples: bath taps in the UK are bathroom faucets in America, rubbers in the UK are erasers in America, the lift becomes an elevator and that’s just a few trivial examples amongst many that often aren’t obvious because whilst we see each other’s TV we generally don’t live in each other’s country and therefore never encounter the trivial, but important, differences like these.

So, if you are doing UK/American marketing try taking a short holiday in the UK or vacation in America and perhaps thereby avoid unfortunate assumptions.

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