By Melissa Mitchell
A company trying to market green toilet seats in Iran may as well flush
down the drain any notions of turning a profit.
"In some Islamic cultures, a green toilet seat would be considered
sacrilegious," according to Surya Vanka, a UI industrial design professor
who has created a computer program called "ColorTool" to aid manufacturers
and designers competing in the global marketplace. Vanka said the same green
toilet seat may well sell easily in other parts of the world, but in certain
Middle Eastern countries, it would be sure to offend local sensibilities.
That's because the color is associated closely with the prophet Mohammed,
who wore a green turban.
Transference of an intended product message or concept from culture to culture
can be derailed by various factors -- language, religion and custom often
play a part. But color often plays a role as well, said Vanka, whose area
of expertise is cross-cultural design.
"In many countries, especially those with traditional cultures, the
meaning associated with colors is dramatic, not subtle," he said. And
often those meanings translate at opposite ends of the spectrum. For example,
in the United States, white almost always has a positive value; the "good
guys" wear white hats, and so do brides. But in India and China, "white
is often the color of mourning," Vanka said.
While the green toilet seat is a purely hypothetical example of what can
go wrong when manufacturers fail to take cultural values into consideration
before entering international markets, it's not a particularly farfetched
one. Vanka's research has turned up a number of similar, real-life marketing
faux pas. Take, for instance, the Japanese manufacturer who tried to sell
black scooters in Vanka's native country, India. "They were having
difficulty because in India, black is considered inauspicious; mothers were
telling their sons they couldn't have a black scooter because they associated
black with death. Sales actually improved after other colors were introduced."
In another case, Vanka said a Canadian airline changed the colors of its
fleet. But after airline officials learned that the new color combination
connoted bad luck in certain South Asian cultures, they switched back to
the original colors. And then there's the U.S. chewing gum manufacturer
whose product wasn't turning much of a profit in China. After changing the
color of the wrapper from green to pink -- a color that symbolizes good
luck for the Chinese -- consumers bit and kept on chewing.
By arming their designers with the ColorTool program, savvy manufacturers
may be able to avoid such costly errors the first time around. Although
much of the information documented in the program is previously published
research in disciplines such as anthropology, Vanka believes his tool is
the first to organize it in a single, easy-to-access, hypertext source.
After beta-testing ColorTool this fall in his classroom, Vanka plans to
publish the program on CD-ROM.
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