It’s a tale told in thousands of business textbooks: the Chevy Nova sold poorly in Spanish speaking countries because its name translated as “doesn’t go”. It’s supposed to be a parable about why market research is important. Ironically, the people who tell this myth are doing exactly what they assumed GM did, not doing any research. Here are some facts:
-Anyone who knows Spanish would know that “Nova” and “No Va” mean different things. This is like assuming English speakers confuse “therapist” with “the rapist”. And anyone who knows Spanish would know that Spanish speakers would not use “no va” to describe a car that doesn’t work, they’d say “no marcha” or “no funciona”.
-The Nova sold well in Latin America. In fact, it sold better than expectations in Venezuela.
-The Mexican state oil company Pemex sold and still sells a brand of gasoline called “nova”, and Mexicans have no problem buying a gasoline that “doesn’t go”.
-Even if nobody in Detroit knew Spanish, there would’ve been thousands of GM employees in Latin America to tell HQ that the name was a problem. And GM did run into this same problem fairly recently in real life. They were introducing a car called the Buick LaCrosse. But in Quebec, “Lacrosse” is slang for “masturbate”, which would’ve hurt sales. They knew such an obvious problem, so they chose to sell the car in Canada as the Buick Allure (although they changed it to LaCrosse a few years ago, but offered to remove the badging for free). And that’s almost certainly what would’ve happened if the Nova name was a problem.
In truth, the whole “Nova doesn’t go” was originally a joke about the car’s reliability. And it was deserved, Consumer Reports in 1975 rated the Nova’s repair incidence as “Much worse than Average”, below competitors such as the Ford Maverick, AMC Hornet, and Plymouth Valiant. There’ve been many other similar jokes, nobody seriously believes Ford is an acronym for “found on roadside dead” or that Fiat stands for “Fix it again, Tony”.
So this urban legend meant to show the importance of market research makes no sense at all. But just like the myth that we only use 10% of our brain’s capacity, which goes against all neuroscience and what we know about natural selection, this one has stuck.