woops...something went wrong there...the post is posted twice...sorry about that!

You might want to look for books and articles which include anthropology as used in design and advertising. As society becomes more global, the need to understand what colors, words and symbols mean in different cultures becomes more important. One famous example is the Chevy Nova. to English speakers, a nova has to do with stars, but to a Spanish speaker, it means "doesn't go," which is a terrible name for a car. Large corporations have been taking this very seriously for several years now.

At the risk of heading off on a tangent, seems Nova was an urban myth, in terms of actually being read as "no va" -- but I'm not a Spanish speaker.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Nova#The_urban_legend

The Toyota MR2 was renamed for France however, according to my brother who's owned two, and now works for them.

The usual explanation is that it sounds like "merde". Wikipedia has "When said in French, the name MR2 ... sounds like est merdeux ... (fr: is filthy). Thus, the car was sold there only as the MR."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MR2

I guess one should investigate Marshall McLuhan. He did coin the term 'global village'. Understanding Media and The Medium is the Massage are two of his books.

Aside from Adbusters, which I always find too extreme and whiny, you can revisit old Tibor Kalman issues of Colors Magazine.

As for companies: Coca-Cola.

Coca-Cola might make a case study for various languages, or tobacco and oil giants, basically any corporations that have attracted (deserved) condemnation.
Hebrew
Arabic
Thai
Don't know if is apocryphal but doesn't Pinto mean something disparaging to the size of manhood in Spanish?

Tim

Or how about McDonald's in India.

Another snippet: Nike ran into controversy around 1997 when a flame-like treatment of the word "Air" on the heel was said to resemble "Allah" in Arabic.

http://web.cba.neu.edu/~hlane/footwear.html

http://www.designobserver.com/archives/cat_branding.html

All the legends are fun, but are they really dissa material? Talk to brand managers in global companies and you'll run into interesting everyday real-world issues - such as finding approriate matched corporate-fonts for different languages, problems with layout apps not supporting certain complex script languages, encoding issues, local subs doing their own thing, etc., etc.,

Cheers, Si

I'm currently on a mission up here in Canada to de-geek chess (which I hope to advance world wide). And to accomplish this most noble task I studied the concepts and techniques of branding.

Although I'm not yet 100% convinced - I think branding is old school. New school is to develope a culture, into which many different products can be presented.

Here are two on-line articles which I hope will help your paper...

This first one is from Emigre 59: http://www.emigre.com/Editorial.php?sect=1&id=26

And this one is from a NY Times article that ran a while ago now. It's a great article on culture and subculture: http://www.murketing.com/journal/?p=119

Hiro

Hi

Thank you all so much for the feedback! got a lot of reading to do! =)
Also just bought 'No Logo' by Naomi Klein which a friend of mine recomended which sounds quite interesting from the start.

As sii noticed that is also something I will need to read more on (type issues, colour issues, etc.). At the moment though I'm just asked to gather images to disect and to read about as a basis for the development towards the actual dissertation. But I do like to read and I will be having a couple of late nights reading all you guys posted since it will give me a better understanding of global branding.

Again thank you so much people! If I find any other recources I will also post them here on the forum, might anyone be interested then at least they will be able to find a lot about global branding on 1 page =)

ave,
dav2