Porsche, Nike, Nutella among most mispronounced global brands
MANILA, Philippines — A recent study has found that a majority of fashion, food and drink, and automotive brands like Louis Vuitton, Godiva and Porsche are still commonly mispronounced.
Online naming tool Business Name Generator, a digital asset under Adventrum, collected a list of popular brands that people struggle to pronounce, comparing their Google Search Volumes with phrases like "how to pronounce" and "how to say."
The overall most commonly mispronounced brand is high-end sports car manufacturer Porsche — which is German, not Italian as it's often mistaken — with 13,700 monthly global search queries, which are extended to 164,400 annual searches.
Following Porsche is American sportswear brand Nike with 10,780 monthly global search queries, rhyming with "spikey" not "bike"; Nike's competitor Adidas was 12th on the list with less than half of Nike's query count at 4,320.
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Rounding up the top five were fashion houses Hermès and Louis Vuitton and South Korean automative manufacturer Hyundai.
Majority of the top 20 were other fashion and automative brands, with outliers being furniture retailer IKEA (No. 6), cocoa spread Nutella (No. 15), luxury store Tag Heuer (No. 19), and tech companies Huawei (No. 16) and Adobe (No. 20).
Food brands outside the top 20 include Belgian chocolates Godiva and beer brand Stella Artois, both with less than a thousand monthly global search queries.
Chloe Chai, spokesperson for Business Name Generator, noted that brand names are often mispronounced when they are in a language different from a speaker's native tongue.
"It is not uncommon for individuals to be unaware that they are mispronouncing a brand name, especially if global marketing campaigns have promoted anglicized versions of the name," added Chai, noting that brands like IKEA and Hyundai moving away from such procedures.
