Bosco

The Bosco jingle is familiar to many of my parents' generation:

I love Bosco
It's rich and chocolatey
Chocolate-flavored Bosco is mighty good for me
Momma puts it in my drink for extra energy
Bosco gives me iron, and sunshine vitamin D
Oh, I love Bosco, that's the drink for me!

I love Bosco, it's full of TNT
Mommy puts it in my milk to try and poison me.

I fooled Mommy, I put it in her tea;
now I have no Mommy to try and poison me!

A common problem marketers and product developers face in naming their products, is the meaning or connotations of their product name in different languages.

My hometown of Astoria, Oregon has a large Finnish population. Try as they would, salesmen for the Bosco company simply could not sell their chocolate-flavoured syrup there, no matter what promotions or enticements they offered. Why? Because "Bosco" is remarkably similiar to the Finnish word for "shit".

No matter how tasty or cheap Bosco might be, no self-respecting Finnish housewife was going to serve her husband and children anything labeled shit.