Sunday, November 22, 2009

"MARKETING" - why is this word the same?

As some of my friends (and blog-site readers) know, I am working, part-time, in Europe.

There are some very interesting differences (and a lot of them) between Europe and the U.S. Some of those differences are “cultural” and some of those difference are “languages,” “currencies,” and “measurement.”

A very funny situation came up during my current trip. (Well, it was funny to me, but I do have a very weird sense of humor, so not all of you will find this one to be funny.)

This situation happened during a meeting with several people from different countries – The Czech Republic, Russia and Poland, and, of course, I am from the U.S.

During this meeting, we were discussing “Marketing”, and, since I have a tendency to ask stupid questions, I asked, “ what is the native-country-language word, in each of your countries, for ‘marketing’ ”.

With straight faces ……

Our team member from Moscow said that “the Russian word for marketing is “marketing.”

And, our team member from Warsaw said that, “the Polish word for marketing is “marketing.”

And, our team member from Prague said that, “the Czech word for marketing is “marketing.”

(When I was in Budapest, Hungary, later in the week, my Hungarian associates also said that “marketing” is the Hungarian word for marketing.)

Update: Same thing happened when I visited Croatia last month (same question, same response.)

DO YOU KNOW WHY “MARKETING” IS THE NATIVE-LANGUAGE WORD IN THOSE COUNTRIES?

Since I am the ultimate “contemplator”, I had to think about this for a while. And, I did so until I finally came up with what I think is the right answer.

I am not going to put the answer (the explanation if you will) here right now. Instead, I’m going to let my blog-site readers guess at the answer for about one week. Afterwards, I’m going to amend this post by adding the answer/explanation.

UPDATE: OKAY, SEVERAL PEOPLE E-MAILED ME WITH THE CORRECT ANSWER. For those of you are still wondering about this, the word, "marketing", did not exist in most of the former European communist countries when they were under communist rule because there was no marketing, no need for marketing, marketing was an activity that did not exist. So, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, these former communist countries, needing to add "marketing" to their languages, took the easy route and simply used the English language word, "marketing." Not altogether different from this is when you see a sentence in a foreign language, a sentence that's talking about something on the web, you will see a bunch of foreign language words mixed in with English language words such as "Internet" and "routers."

1 comment:

  1. Those countries had no markets to speak of until recently. NY

    ReplyDelete