[imagesource: Sally Anscombe/Getty Images]

A friend of mine who works in advertising is of the firm belief that before a logo, name, or copy is approved or adopted by a company, it should be screened by a room of 10-year-olds.

If they giggle, or smirk, don’t ask questions, just go back to the drawing board.

Another tip is to choose the name of your product in a language that you actually understand, or with the help of someone who speaks it.

Failing this, you could find yourself faced with the same problem as many who marked themselves with a Japanese tattoo in the early 2000s.

Instead of a variation on the already intolerable “live, laugh, love”, they sometimes translated as something mundane like “soup”.

A brewery in Canada, Hell’s Basement, decided to ignore all of the above, going straight to production of its New Zealand Pale Ale, before realising their mistake.

They named the brew ‘Huruhuru’.

Here’s The Guardian with why that’s a bad thing.

“Some people call it appreciation, I call it appropriation,” te reo Māori exponent and TV personality Te Hamua Nikora said on Facebook, after explaining that most Māori would use the word “huruhuru” as a reference to pubic hair.

Nikora said that he had contacted the brewery to inform them of their mistake, but they’re still selling it.

Image: Hell’s Basement

A leather store in Wellington also adopted the name.

“If you are selling leather, call it leather, don’t call it pubic hair unless you are selling pubic hair and don’t call beer pubic hair unless you make it with pubic hair”, says Nikora.

He went on to ask non-Māori businesses to use their own language to promote their products.

Hell’s Basement co-founder Mike Patriquin says that he thought ‘huruhuru’ meant “feather”, and that the company didn’t intend to offend anyone.

The leather store also said that they thought it meant fur, feather, or wool.

This isn’t the first time that a company with no Māori employees tried to use the language on their products and failed.

Two years ago, Coca-Cola attempted to combine reo Māori and English, inadvertently writing “Hello, Death” on a vending machine in New Zealand.

Nobody has done their best work here, with the exception of the man trying to get people to stop misusing his language.

[source:guardian]