Monday, December 29, 2008

From the 'Not A Good Idea' department . . .


. . . we have this story of corporate re-branding gone awry.

It seems that earlier this year, Turkey's World Focus Airlines decided to rename itself. It wanted a more global image, something that would appeal to the international traveler. It came up with the name 'AnkAir' (which, being Turkish, I presume is a contraction of 'Ankara Airways' or something like that).

So far, so good.

It also came up with a new logo, apparently intended to look like the spreading wings of a bird, but which somewhat resembled the letter 'W'.

Also so far, so good.

Unfortunately, it then put the logo and its new name rather too close together on its aircraft. This caused speakers of English-English (as opposed to American-English, where the term isn't common) to do a double-take before they burst into raucous laughter. You see, in English-English, the two in combination appear to form a rather unfortunate word.






Peter

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'll bet there are going to be a few wankairs unemployed pretty soon!

Jim

Anonymous said...

Oh, my Brit friends who run the fish & chips place are going to love this printout! We have a lot of discussions about language.

:-)