Marketing can make or break a launch, especially for startups. Think about getting someone on your team who has at least a foundational understanding of linguistics.

Most people don’t know what linguistics is. It’s the study of how languages work, not necessarily the study of a language. A linguist isn’t someone who speaks many languages but rather someone who studies the phenomenon of language, how they’re put together and how they come apart.

If you’ve had a jingle, slogan, or tag line stuck in your head you can blame the wonders of prosody, vowel harmony, and probably a few well known literary devices. Some people seem to have a natural flair for language, and this generally translates well into marketing. Have you ever read copy and thought “this isn’t good, but I can’t tell why?” or read something and thought “this is great!” without being overwhelmed by the language the author was using?

There’s a lot of things you know about your own native language, but you probably don’t know you know it. One is that vowels produced at the front of your mouth (think the “ee” sound in “cheese”) seem to be associated with light flavours and textures, while vowels produced in the back of the mouth (“uh” from “fudge”) are associated with heaviness. Ice cream, a heavy, indulgent, and creamy food, tends to be branded with back vowels. Linguist Dan Jurafsky studied ice cream flavour names and found that the major brands all tend to use back vowels when naming their ice cream selection, from regular ones like chocolate, coconut, and fudge, as well as things like cookie dough, Caramel Chew Chew, and Jamoca.

Jurafsky made up a bunch of minimal pair hypothetical ice cream names and had people rate the qualities of the ice cream purely based on the names. “Participants rated a hypothetical ice cream named Frosh as smoother, creamier, and richer than Frish.”

Still in the food realm, the pricing of a menu item can be based purely off of its accompanying description. Words like “flavoursome” detract from the value of a food (you shouldn’t have to be reassured your dish will have flavour) while words like “succulent” instead of “moist” will add to the price. If your restaurant offers “abundant” helpings of food, you might be aiming for middle class customers, while more expensive establishments offer shorter, curter descriptions of their dishes.

Away from food, the globally popular retailer UNIQLO has it’s well known catch phrase いらっしゃいませ (irasshaimase) in the Japanese stores, and “welcome to UNIQLO” in English speaking locations. They strive to make the UNIQLO experience universal no matter where you are, but they’ve run into a problem with their “welcome” phrase in Australia. You see, we Australians like to be able to reply and we’re used to hearing some variation of “how are you?”.

In the same way that it’s embarrassing to reply “you too” when your waiter tells you to enjoy your meal, it’s just as bad to say “good thanks, and you?” in reply to a cheery “welcome to UNIQLO!”, and the complaints have reached a point where the company is reportedly trying to figure out a way to accommodate to Australian culture yet still keep a phrase as close to the original as possible. This is a good example to highlight how culture plays a role with language, and luckily for you, we linguists cover cross cultural communication, too.

Famous mistranslations in marketing campaigns are abundant, and hilarious. American Motors have the Matador model, and the name in America has an association with masculinity and strength while in Spain the campaign was ill-received — matador means “killer/murderer”. One of Ford’s campaign slogans “Every car has a high-quality body”, was mistranslated as “corpse” in Belgium. Electrolux, a Swedish company, learned the hard way to double check American slang after running a tagline that read “Nothing sucks like an Electrolux”.

Slang in itself is extremely interesting. There’s a bit of contention as to where slang originates from — is it teenagers? university students? or children even? One thing is for sure (especially with all the talk of the impenetrable millennials) if you want to target a demographic, you need to speak their language. When you’re building your brand, using social media, and interacting with your customer you need to be relatable. Appearing “out of touch” is one way to prevent engagement and the mistakes can be as simple as incorrect emoji usage in your Tweets and captions — using the 💦 emoji might not come across as you think it does.

Accidental innuendos, like the “splashing sweat” emoji can make or break your branding. Having a marketer who can see possible cross-cultural miscommunications before posting can save you a lot of trouble. Likewise, being able to break bad news and use euphemisms that are culturally sensitive is a good skill to have too. Being able to see a slogan from more than one perspective can prevent you from saying “Wang Cares” and having your audience hear “wankers” (a real campaign slogan from IT company Wang). Fortunately for IKEA, they had Thai locals evaluate their product names before launching their first store in Thailand, during which they realised several of their product names referenced obscene sex acts.

While you might not be targeting an overseas customer, your target demographic is probably fairly multicultural. Trust me when I say you don’t want to suck like an Electrolux.