Foreign branding

In advertising and marketing, foreign branding is the use of foreign or foreign-sounding brand names for companies, goods, and services to imply they are of foreign origin, generally to make them appear to come from a place that seems attractively fitting, or at least exotic. It may also be done if the country of origin has a poor image, in order to make customers believe that a company and/or its products originate from a country seen more favourably.

In non-English-speaking countries, many brands use English- or American-styled names to suggest foreign origin. In non-French- and non-Italian-speaking countries, many cosmetics, toiletry, and apparel brands use French- or Italian-styled names. Names suggesting Japanese, Scandinavian, German, and other origins are similarly used for effect outside their home countries.

Foreign letters and diacritical marks (such as the umlaut) are often used to give brand names foreign flavor. The heavy metal umlaut is used by a number of rock bands, usually to impart a generally Germanic and Gothic overtone to the band's name. Examples include Mötley Crüe, Motörhead, Queensrÿche, and Blue Öyster Cult.

Some fonts, sometimes called simulation typefaces, have also been designed that represent the characters of the Roman alphabet but evoke another writing system. This group includes typefaces designed to appear as Arabic, Chinese characters, Cyrillic, Indic scripts, Greek, Hebrew, Kana, or Thai. These are used largely for the purpose of novelty to make something appear foreign, or to make businesses such as restaurants offering foreign food clearly stand out.

Where different keyboard layouts or character encodings map different scripts to the same key positions or code points, directly converting matching characters provides an alternative to transliteration when the appearance, rather than the meaning, is desired.