A Very Dutch Branding Issue

The Hague, The Netherlands

Serbia Says Jailed Mladic Will Face War Crimes Trial

After 15 years, Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb... was captured. He will be sent to The Hague for trial...

If I had read this headline a few years ago, The Hague would not have been a place that I should like to visit, let alone live. Doesn't that sound like he was sent to jail (e.g., He was sent to Riker's Island)? (BTW - Rijkers, also named for a Dutchman) Even the BBC, the anchor said "That was John Stone AT The Hague" (Wha?! Dear Dept. of Queen's English, how can you be AT a city?) Bottom line, the Dutch have some branding issues. 

Allow me to propose some branding guidelines for anyone in the House of Orange looking to rebrand their wijk/feifdom/bosch/county/dorp/city/state/country/land:

1. Saint or San - OK; The, 't, 's - Not OK - Location names should start with New, South, Saint (San), or Old, but never "The". Oude Delfshaven, approved. 's Hertogenbosch, foul! Dam or dijk (dike) are good too because they are usually suffixes.  Plus who doesn't love to say "DAAAM!" or "DIKE!"
2. Pick a name with fair vowel to consonant ratio -  The Dutch language is difficult for gringos and non-gringos. What with its funny throat clearing noises, alternating vowel rich words (e.g. zeeëend) and consonant rich words (e.g. slechtstschrijvend) add two more degrees of difficulty. Heck, it's a challenge for us to pronounce the Dutch word "please" (alstublieft.) Paris is a great name. Milan is a great name. Paris is probably the same spelling in every Latin based language. People name cookies after Milan. Also, people name their children "Paris" for Pete's sake! (BbA does not in any way condone naming children Paris)
3. Paris => Parisian; The Hague => Haguer? Haguian? Haagse - For your rebranded town, choose a name where country-men or women will have some relation to the place (from Paris, a.k.a. Parisian. From New York, New Yorker) For the record, people who are from The Hague are Haagse. If you are from The Netherlands, you are ______ (Answer below). If you guessed Hollandaise, you are in good company with people who like rich sauces and French food. Also bad: United States. Hence, "Americans", to the justifiably chagrined 700 Million plus Latinos and some righteously indignant Canadians.
4. You say Binnenhof,  I say Buitenhof, They Say Hofijver, We all say Parliament - One of The Hague's most famous landmarks is its parliament complex. It has a pond in front and is the location of the original Count's Hedge ('s Gravenhage). The Binnenhof, what I incorrectly call the picturesque building, literally means inner courtyard, not the building as I refer to it. Hofijver is the moat in front of it. Buitenhof, the courtyard across the street. It is best to call the whole place parliament. Another bad name, The White House, see 1. above. Pick something comprehensive, that describes the whole location.

   

   The actual Binnenhof, (photo by lyzadanger)
5. Minimize the g's and therefore the growling - If I tell people I live in Amsterdam, they immediately picture where I live: windmills, canals, red lights, and non-stop dance parties. If I say 's Gravenhage, they say "Bless you!" I have a hard time with the letter "g" in the Dutch language. In most cases, it has a throat-clearing, growling sound that immediately betrays you as a non-Dutch native when attempted. When you rebrand your city, try to keep these to a minimum. An exception, Gouda, synonymous with tasty Dutch dairy products, is fun to say in English. As in "Have a Goud-a day!" Caution, in Dutch it is pronounced more like "HCCKKH-ouwt-ehh". If you say "Good-a" no one will know what you are talking about.
6. Pick a name that sounds the same in multiple languages - French for the Netherlands "Les Pays-Bas", Spanish for the Netherlands "Países Bajos" or "Holanda".  All of which connote "low lands" in their respective language. This compounds people not knowing where you are from if you say "The Netherlands." because it sounds nothing like your native language. Hence, I sometimes say Amsterdam, even as we are about 60 km from there. Better to choose a name like Caracas or Kodiak. No translation necessary.

Here are some trivia questions to further illustrate Dutch branding issues: 

I. Which one of these name is the original name for The Hague?

1. t' Hetogenbosch
2. Des Graven Hage
3. Haag
4. Heerhugowaard

II. True or False If you are from The Netherlands you are Dutch

III. True or False If you are from The Netherlands you are from Holland

IV. True of False If you speak Dutch, you also speak Flemish and vice versa

V. What territory used to be part of Holland?

1. Flanders
2. Wallonia
3. Zeeland
4. Zealand

So the next time you drain a part of the north sea or create you own city, why not choose something that is easy for Dutchmen and non-Dutchmen to wrap their mind around? My suggestion Flavoland (as in Flavor Flav o'land).




Answers: 
I: 2., II: True, III: True and False Holland is an easter, low-lying, sub-area of The Netherlands. Amseterdam and The Hague are in Holland. After all, people in The Netherlands living outside Holland do not like people saying they are from Holland., IV: True, Dutch and Flemish derive from the same root language, V. Flanders is the Dutch/Flemish speaking part of the dysfunctional country of Belgium.

Grateful for Trash Day

Den Haag, Nederlands

Today is our once a week "rubbish collection" and we have never been so grateful for a trash day. It's the day when I bound out of bed, run down the "ladders", and happily take out our very smelly refuse.

There are no cans outside, no cans in a garage, and the seagulls get into our trash if we leave it out on our tiny porch. Hence, we usually have very smelly trash by the time collection rolls around every week.

On Monday night, a day I like to call Trash Day Eve, I scour the flat for things to throw away. Nearly finished box of cereal. Adios! Almost empty jar of pickles. See ya! 1/16 left in the Aveda Color Enhancing shampoo bottle. Tot ziens! I just cannot take the risk of those emptying in the middle of the week.

Of course, people on the street must think I am strange (like most of my friends already do). I will surreptitiously throw a chicken bone in the public rubbish bin on my way to the store if I know it is going to be a long time between pickups.

A few more things that strike me as different when you stay in the Netherlands:

• No recycling pickup - Paper is picked up once a month but other than that, you are on your own should you choose to recycle. This is a typical Dutch solution. The economics and environmental impact are debatable if municipalities pick it up curbside. Dutch solution: easy-to-empty bins (for trucks that is) at select locations around town.
• Deposit bottles go to the store - there is a large deposit on some bottles (EUR 0.25). Shaw's in Massachusetts has these sorts of machines although the small deposit makes it less tempting. The machine prints a ticket that you take to the cashier for a refund. I cannot figure out which ones are deposit and which ones are not, yet.
• Al Cans Don't Recycle? - I have not figured out where to take the few aluminum cans we have. At the recycling center I only see glass and paper. I have not seen any plastic either now that I think about it by the city hall says there are places to deposit those recyclables as well. Also no steel can (e.g., soup cans) recycling
• Plastic bags - Small plastic bags, the current scourge of humanity, are still widely available at the grocery and retail stores for free, unlike what I saw in Germany. Most people opt to purchase a reusable, heavier-grade bag of rice paper or plastic for a nominal charge. I don't see a lot of people with the designer bags that you see in the States and other places. My Gucci, collapsible bag certainly makes me standout.

A bit of regulation at the expense of marketing would probably make sense here as well as in the United States. The banks of the Maas river were covered with plastic bags and I have seen them skimming the bags out of the moat in front of the iconic parliament building.

My uncle told me a good idea: all packaging of a particular type should be the same color. For example, all food plastic should be brown, all heavy-grade cleaning plastic blue, all glass brown, etc. That way it could be easily sorted by machine. Apparently, glass is not worth very much when the colors get mixed. These days there are people who sort this glass by hand as it flies by on a conveyor. Yikes!

Babel Redux

Google Translate is another one of these developments that Google seems to roll-out, for free no less, and no one seems to blink an eye. To me, it is further proof of not being evil. It makes Yahoo babelfish look like some sort of throwback translation algorithm in the eighties. The translations seem very accurate, at least the English translations of the Dutch things I have looked are coherent and require little additional decoding and it is tightly integrated with Chrome.

I had been using this a little since Google introduced it, usually for work assignments to research competitors or learn information posted by partners for marketing purposes. Now that I am living in Holland, it has become critical daily tool. Even one of those things that you wonder how you could live without it.

The translation box "instantly" translates (duh!) the words as you type them and is Google-ized, meaning it is clutter-free. It also will try to auto-detect the language you are typing (very cool). There is a robotic pronunciation which I don't find very helpful, but usually entertaining. You can also copy and paste multiple lines and it will keep it nicely separated (babelfish made it hard to do this before)

Not only does Translate provide a copy and paste box web-page, but in Chrome, it automatically translates pages as you surf them. Once it sees you are translating a lot of pages into a certain language (e.g. Dutch), it automatically starts translating without even asking you. Of course, you can turn it off. Equally helpful is the mouse-overs/tooltips/hovers contain the original text, so that you can see what words it is translating, in case there is confusion or you want to learn the word in the original language.

The browser translation is not perfect by any means. For example, when I am looking at sites in Dutch, like marktplaats.nl (local equivalent of craigslist), it will not translate all of the frames or the picklists, yet. Still, it is a leap above what we had before, and will help homogenize the world, for better or worse.