The iPhone 7 launch has left many sniggering and not without reason.
Not only does the new phone have no jack which had left many iPhone buffs disgruntled, it also came up with a slew of pretty lame slogans such as – ‘This changes everything. Again’, ‘Bigger than bigger’, ‘This is 7’.
Clearly, their advertising team were not at their creative best that day, that or a bunch of uninspired employees locked in a sterile room had to come up with one slogan each before they were allowed to go home.
The marketing team has provided ‘stiff’ competition to the advert team with zero research into what the slogans might mean in different languages.
The slogans have left people in Hong Kong pretty amused, as the phone’s tagline is ‘This is 7’ directly translates to ‘This is penis’, which on second thought might not be straying far from the truth.
Apparently, ‘7’ in colloquial Cantonese is ‘柒’, pronounced ‘tsat‘ which stands for penis.
That paired with the other slogan, ‘Bigger than bigger’ isn’t exactly the best combination.
The Cantonese term is used to mock someone when they do something goofy, so at least it’s not offensive and nobody’s readying their pitchforks.
Even in other languages the translations sound a bit weird. In Chinese, for example, the slogan stands for ‘7, is here.’ and in Taiwanese it’s ‘Exactly is 7.’
If anything, they should have looked at what happened when Samsung released Note 7 which in Cantonese sounds like ‘a stick of penis’.
It’s okay the jokes are going to stop. Some day.
