On Toyota's misstep in advertising its Land Cruiser SUV in Beijing: A distortion of consumers' sociolinguistic system

Multinational corporations' attempt to combine advertising creativity with local cultures is examined in the case of Toyota's 2004 Land Cruiser SUV advertising campaign in Beijing. Within a sociolinguistic framework, the paper identifies characteristics of a multinational corporation's advertising mistakes that distorted Chinese consumers' sociolinguistic system. We encourage multinational corporations to recognize the important role of sociolinguistic systems indigenous to targeted consumers in international markets. The challenge to global marketing researchers is to engage in bicultural and bilingual ethnographic studies outside the Western cultural dominance so that greater understanding of international marketing behaviors can be sustained.