The field of advertising is a very interesting industry in business and one, which is very fun to discuss. One of the finest things to talk about is all the mistakes that international corporations make when trying to market their services and products in other countries.

Generally these issues occur because of translation problems or because the company does not fully understand the culture of the nation in which they are marketing their product into. Remember there are over 300 countries in the world and generally about 150 of them are pretty viable for multinational corporations with pretty good products.

In reviewing the Internet's lists of multinational corporation advertising mistakes and international advertising of products while studying soft drink makers; I came across quite a few here is one very funny one that happened in China; Pepsi's "Come alive with the Pepsi Generation" translated into "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave", in Chinese.

Of course PepsiCo, Inc. is not alone in making mistakes Coca-Cola has also been in a number of markets and has also made mistakes in China for instance I found this on the Internet; The Coca-Cola name in China was first read as "Ke-kou-ke-la", meaning "Bite the wax tadpole" or "female horse stuffed with wax", depending on the dialect. Coke then researched 40,000 characters to find a phonetic equivalent "ko-kou-ko-le", translating into "happiness in the mouth."

If you are a student of advertising or you work in a large multinational corporation he need to check things over quite a few times to make sure you did not make any bad mistakes, because if you do someone will notice and you will be very sorry when your product does not sell. Please consider this in 2006.