Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Weird product names series: Men's milk

In Japan there are quite a few brand names that sound strange. Foreigners often notice soft drink brands such as "Pocari Sweat" and "Calpis". Why would you name something that people should drink "sweat"? Although sweat is also a liquid, it is not really something you drink... One might think that "pocari" might mean something good then. Perhaps this means "replenish after sweating" or something? No, apparently "pocari" is not a word in Japanese, it just "sounds nice".

Calpis is a little better perhaps. But having "piss" as part of the brand name for drinks is not that great (and in Swedish "kall" means cold, and can be used with drinks). As a side note, "calpis" can also be used as slang for semen in Japanese, I am told. Mainly because that is what the Calpis series of yogurt drinks look like...


Which leads us to another yogurt like drink: "White water". The front says "Whiter water, for men". The back says メンズミルク, "Men's milk" in the Japanese phonetic alphabet used for foreign loan words. I checked with some Japanese friends and they confirmed that "men's milk" sounds just as bad in Japanese... Also, it looks like one would imagine men's milk would look like...

Maybe they are making up these weird product names on purpose to sell to the "foreigners that thinks the name is so funny they have to buy it even though they do not want the product"-market?

No comments:

Post a Comment