Marketing Safari

Bodybags for Children? - IKEA Fails the Naming Game

IKEA has a new line in their stores with products for children which they call Barnslig. As you may know, IKEA is a Swedish company (hence the blue and yellow colours) and in Swedish Barnslig means childish. Sounds like an excellent name for a product line for children.

The problem is that just across the channel, in neighbouring Denmark, Barnslig doesn't mean childish. That would be spelled barnlig. But what "barns lig" means is a child's body. That's a rather unfortunate meaning for a product line for children (or any other product line for that matter). I couldn't imagine putting my child into a sleeping bag called child's body. It would be like letting my child sleep in a body bag, which I would of course never do.

IKEA has stopped selling the sleeping bags, but that's got nothing to do with the name. The zippers didn't work. The rest of the product line, stuffed animals, towels, sheets, pillows etc. is still in the shelfs under the name "Barnslig". Childish mistake and unnecessary.

Hjörtur

Related articles:
Bad Barnding: Lolita Beds Pulled by Woolworths

Bad Branding - Lolita Beds Pulled by Woolworths

Google it!

When you choose a name for a company, product, service or a concept, you google it, look it up on wikipedia and slang dictionaries. That should be a rule.

Woolworths put a new line of beds for preteen girls on the market under the name Lolita. As most of you probably know Lolita is the paedophiles dream, a willing, seductive underage girl, referring to the carachter Lolita in Nabokov's book, followed by Stanley Kubrick's film in 1962 and Adrian Lyne's film in 1997. The search engines actually know this so you shouldn't get child pornography when you search for Lolita, but on Google you get a note saying that some results have been removed because of legal issues. If you click that link you see an explaination that the content was removed because it contained child pornography.

Lolita is actually just a name that is quite common in the Spanish language, meaning something like "little Lola" or "little Delores". But it is very unlikely that noone in the marketing department of Woolworths or the ad agencies knew of it's other meaning or didn't bother to check, but possible. It's also a strange coincident that the name ended up on a bed for preteen girls but not on kitchen appliances or something totally different.

So the question remains, did they intentionally name the product Lolita knowing the words connection to child pornography? This sure got people talking and Woolworths made headlines all over the UK. If Woolworths hasn't been going too well, this might have been a desperate measure to get some publicity. Even though they pulled the product line, it may have been worth it in the end. But they claim noone knew.

What do you think about the kind of marketing that crosses the line just to get attention? Do you believe this was accidental?

Hjörtur