Alston Grove

Volkswagen sent me their latest marketing campaign. Flush from success of using a German word, Fahrvergnugen (meaning “driving pleasure”), in American ads, they decided to try another foreign word… Auffahrt.

When you just now read that word to yourself, did you think it sounded kind of funny? Using a word that means “driveway”, “ascend to”, or “approach road” seems like a great idea for an automobile brochure. But when the word is pronounced, it sounds roughly equivalent to the English phrase, “oh fart”. Yep, brilliant bit of marketing there. Maybe instead of putting “enter” in parenthesis at the bottom of the ad, they should replace it with “exit”.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 6th, 2004 at 9:13 pm and is filed under Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.