Pat I am impressed with your findings. I think you report is worthwhile. On the subject of cowboy boots. I know a lot about that subject. Do You know why some cowboy boots have pointed toes????? To squash cockroaches in the corner of the room......... . . . ----- Original Message ----- From: "Pat" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, February 22, 2002 5:40 PM Subject: [MAUPIN-CHAT] More oddities for marketing > Germans buy over 500,000 pairs of cowboy boots annually, but US companies > get little of the business because the Germans consider the toes in US > boots not pointy enough. > Italians dislike grapefruit-flavored Gatorade, while Germans love it. > Many Europeans think Hershey chocolate bars taste bitter. > The British do not like Jell-O unless it comes in a solid or wafer form. > General Mills introduced its cake mix into Japan that could be prepared in > an electric rice cooker, but the product turned out to be unsuccessful > because Japanese homemakers believed the cake mix might contaminate the > purity of their rice. > Heinz is showing the rest of the world how to eat ketchup: advertisements in > Greece show consumers how ketchup can be poured on pasta, eggs, and meat, > but they found that Europeans like spicier, hotter ketchup than do > Americans. > Brazilian housewives determine their self esteem by their home making > abilites and the importance of making soup from scratch eliminated any value > of a soup from a can, Campbell found. > Japanese are "anti-can" since most walk to the market and don't like to > carry heavy cans. > Campbell Soup company has divided the U.S. into 22 distinct markets based on > unique cultural and ethnic tastes and preferences. Example include spicy > Ranchero beans and Nacho cheese soup in the Southwest, Creole soup in the > South, red been soup in Hispanic markets, pepper pot soup for Philadelphia > and zesty pickles for the Northwest (I sure hope this isn't the name of a > soup!). > > Oh, and in case you were interested, they found American consumers preferred > blue and almond colors for their Rubbermaid containers. > > And, on one last note: I saw a Mitsubishi today and those are diamonds, not > triangles. I found that Mitsubishi means "diamond" in Japanese. > > learned something new today! > > Pat > > > ==== MAUPIN-CHAT Mailing List ==== > RootsWeb forbids posting of copyrighted material without permission of the author. Read RootsWeb's Acceptable Use Policy at > <http://www,rootsweb.com/rootsweb/aup.html> > > ============================== > To join Ancestry.com and access our 1.2 billion online genealogy records, go to: > http://www.ancestry.com/rd/redir.asp?targetid=571&sourceid=1237 >

> Pat I am impressed with your findings. I think you report is worthwhile. > On the subject of cowboy boots. I know a lot about that subject. > Do You know why some cowboy boots have pointed toes????? > To squash cockroaches in the corner of the room......... This was a 9 page report. I never thought International Marketing could be this interesting (to me at least). When we lived in Germany, the Germans were taken with all things Cowboy and Western. They would have dress up parties with a Western theme. Whenever we went somewhere and a German noticed we were Americans, they would excitedly ask "Where are you from?" and We'd say "Texas" and they would just be thrilled. I couldn't help but feel sorry for the Americans who would answer "Kansas" or "Minnesota" or some non-cowboy state. We found out that this all stemmed from a series of books that a German writer, Karl May, wrote about the old West. He had never been to the US, but that didn't matter. The Germans loved this series and imagined that everything the guy wrote was factual. And corny? Oh, was it corny! His main characters were "Old Shatterhand" and his Indian friend "Winnetou." Here is a quote from a site about European-produced Western movies: "In 1962, however, German producer Horst Wendlandt and director Harald Reinl teamed up to make The Treasure of Silver Lake, based on the frontier stories of German writer Karl May. Filmed in Yugoslavia with American actor Lex Barker and Frenchman Pierre Brice in the lead roles, this tongue-in-cheek adventure proved extremely popular with European audiences. Other producers jumped on the bandwagon and by 1964 some two dozen German, Italian and Spanish Westerns had been made. " This is a quote from a site about Karl May--and it has been translated from German to English with somewhat funny results: Since generations Karl May (1842-1912) belongs world-wide to the most popular and most widely read German writers. The German-language total circulation of its in the wild west of North America and in the Orient 19. Century exceeds playing adventure narrations the 80 million. Translations are present in 30 languages. On the basis valuable bibliographic-literary special certifications become views of the life, which work and working of the famous Saxonian writer obtain, who attained Winnetou and old Shatterhand, Hadschi Halef Omar and Kara Ben Nemsi world fame as a creator of the imperishable adventure shapes. So, our cowboy boots have evolved from the extreme pointed toe types as B.F. said, but to the Germans, that is terrible! No telling what they would think about "walking heels" either. Pat