My mum was watching television the other day when an advert for a car firm caught her eye and prompted her to contact me with a question: ‘Are Skoda really trying to tell me how I should pronounce Skoda?’
Well, yes, mum, it turns out they are, and I think you’ll find you should actually be calling them Shhhkoda. Once I’d convinced Professor Attwood that I wasn’t trying to shush her but employ the ‘correct’ pronunciation of Skoda, she still had questions. Is Shhhkoda really how you’re supposed to pronounce it? Does it really matter? And why is Skoda, sorry, Shhhkoda telling people now anyway?
After all, Skoda celebrated its 130th birthday last year and has been selling cars in the UK since the early 1900s (you can read more about the brand’s history here). It feels slightly odd to not worry about people pronouncing your name wrong for more than a century before deciding to try and politely correct them.
And yet, here is Skoda with a minute-long TV advert, accompanied by media and marketing campaigns, billboards and social media posts, trying to push the sssh into Shhhkoda. And perhaps Autocar has to admit a small bit of guilt here. After all, the reason Skoda seems to be mispronounced here involves the háček that appears above the S – you know, the little wiggly thing that appears above the S in Škoda, but which Autocar house style means we don’t use for capital letters. But in Czechia, that little squiggle changes the pronunciation of an S to a sh. Hence Shhhkoda. Look, just do an impression of Sean Connery saying shurely shome mishtake and you’ll be halfway there.
In a statement, Skoda UK marketing director Kirsten Stagg said: “The Š has always been part of our identity, but we've never really given it centre stage before.” Trying to push its use is designed to help the firm celebrate its Czech heritage, while “creating something playful, memorable and unmistakably Škoda”.
If this seems an odd move by Skoda, it isn’t even the first car brand to try this in recent years. Not that long ago, Hyundai launched an advertising campaign explaining that Brits should be saying ‘He-oon-day’ and not ‘High-oond-aye’. And there aren’t even any weird accents to blame in Hyundai.
Really, apart from questioning if trying to tell potential customers that they're not always right about pronounciation is actually a good thing, it's the timing of these campaigns that feels a bit odd. Why now? After all, the Skoda campaign is being done at a time when loads of new car brands that nobody has any idea how to pronounce are flooding the UK market. Plenty of people still wouldn’t even know that Jaecoo, Geely, Lepas, Changan and Xiamomi are car firms, let alone know how to pronounce them. Is now the time to make people question your brand's name?
But I think that’s the real genius here: it feels like Skoda is doing a bit of a power flex. People know Skoda and they like Skoda, so the fact the firm can expend its marketing effort correcting pronunciation shows how far ahead of all those Chinese brands it is. People care about Skoda, even if they haven't been saying the name of the brand right.
By contrast, the challenge for firms like Geely isn’t getting Brits to says its name correctly – jee-lee, for the record – but actually making sure they’ve heard of the brand at all. New car firms can’t afford to worry about how many people pronounce their name correctly. They just want people to know they exist. Geely simply wants people to buy its cars; it can teach people how to pronounce its name in a century or so.
But everybody knows Shhhkoda, so Shhhkoda can have some fun with that. And the key is that the campaign is fun and lighthearted, rather than being stern or instructive. It plays into Shhhkoda’s reputation as a relaxed, warm, friendly and likeable brand. Much like its recent sponsorship to rebrand the Peak District as the Peaq District, after its forthcoming EV flagship, raised plenty of smiles. Well, apart from with a handful of slightly po-faced protestors.
Crucially, I don’t actually think Shhhkoda really cares how my mum, or anyone else, actually pronounces Shhhkoda. The important thing is that my mum noticed the TV advert, and knows about Shhhkoda, is thinking about Shhhkoda and has now prompted me to write several hundred words about Shhhkoda. For any brand, it’s important to be talked about, and this campaign is making sure people are.
Will it make anyone more likely to buy a Peaq or an Epiq or a Superb or a Fabia? When so much of modern marketing is about reinforcing brands rather than selling products, I’m not sure that matters. But if people are looking to buy a new car, customers might just be more inclined to buy one from a firm that can laugh about its name, rather than one with a strange name they've never heard of.