Promotion is essentially a communication process aimed at drawing the customer's attention to the firm's products and services. Again, publications on international marketing are replete with stories of real blunders. They range from Chevy's use of the name "Nova" in Latin America, where "no va" means "no go," to Esso's multimillion-dollar expenditures to change its name, to P&G's ordeal over (and eventual abandonment of) the half-moon and five-star corporate symbol.
The major decision a firm must cope with in planning a promotional strategy is whether to go with "one name, one message, one voice" 1 or to develop promotional schemes tailored to the local audience. The main goal here is, again, to take advantage of economies of scale: the more people who are reached with the same promotional instrument, the lower the cost of promoting the product, the smaller the contribution of promotional expenses to the overall cost of the product, and the lower and more competitive the price of the final product.
There have been numerous successful attempts to carry one message internationally. Esso was able to use its advertising theme "Put a tiger in your tank" with considerable success in most countries in the world. In French, however, the word for "tank" is reservoir, which in the context of the phrase could have been highly suggestive, so the word moteur was substituted. And in Thailand, where the tiger is not a symbol of strength, the campaign was not understood. In England, a U.S.-designed advertising campaign built on the slogan "Don't spend a penny until you've tried ... " had to be modified because the phrase "spend a penny" in Britain is the equivalent of "go see a man about a dog" in the United States. 2
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