Author: Mike Byrne
Date: 07:32:52 12/22/03
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On December 22, 2003 at 01:07:03, margolies,marc wrote: >the former 'standard oil of new jersey' (now called Exxon-Mobil)is still called >Esso (pronouned S.O.) in Italy and in Canada (national subsidiaries), at least >it was the last time I pumped my gas in those two places. I never heard this >Japanese story before; could you cite a reference, please? >How many american gas stations are there in Japan? > Esso was derived from S.O. as in "S.O. of N.J." (Standard Oil of New Jersey). The Esso to Exxon name change happened in the mid 70's at the top parent level. Later they merged with Mobil. Exxon Mobil Corporation is the parent of Esso, Mobil and ExxonMobil companies. " Another interesting situation is when a company anxiously spends considerable time and money to ensure that not only are their products appropriately named for each of the foreign markets they compete in, but that the company name itself is free of negative implications in any marketplace. Perhaps the most well known example of this is the series of name changes that Standard Oil have gone through in their decades of business. After concluding that Standard Oil sounded too much like a U.S. company, they changed the corporate name to "Esso." Esso, however, has some significant negative connotations in the Japanese market: it translates phonetically to "stalled car." Using modern technology, Esso spent great amounts of money studying the language and slang of dozens of languages, enabling them to feed the data into a computer which then generated inoffensive non-word names suitable for an international corporation. This list of words was then given to numerous linguists who ascertained that "Exxon" was the best of the choices. Ironically, Exxon is similar to an obscure obscenity in Aluet Eskimo. Richard Carr of the Carr Group notes that for all the effort spent by Exxon to devise a pristine name, they then changed their advertising slogan from "the sign of happy motoring" to "the sign of the double cross." The company has again revised their slogan, however, since 'double cross' has significant negative connotations in English. " http://www.intuitive.com/globalsoftware/gs-chap5.html
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