Marketing 101: Understand your customer 28, April 2009
Posted by thegulfblog.com in Iran.Tags: China exporting, conspiracy, Iran, Jaffa, Marketing, orange
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Many sources have reported the recent Iranian outbursts at the apparent sale of Israeli fruit in Tehran. It transpires, however, that this is simply down to a Chinese exporter that stuck the Israeli brand ‘Jaffa’ on the fruit, thinking that this carries connotations of quality. Whilst this may be true in some parts of the world, this clearly shows that this exporter has woefully misunderstood its market. Whilst it is, nevertheless, just a misunderstanding, several Iranian officials have (as usual, some might say) made abject fools of themselves by describing this as a ‘conspiracy‘ and demanding that those responsible be brought to justice. Such a pathetically ignorant attitude would be morbidly tragic if it weren’t quite so funny. I fear, however, that Iran would not be alone in such an absurd over reaction: imagine, for example, chairs being imported into China with a ‘Made in Independent Tibet’ sticker…
Picture: the offending fruit
Hat tip: MEI
The Gulf blog 
[…] kind of reaction is similar to that after the Chinese-Israeli orange importing incident last year, not to mention the Chinese jeans fiasco. If I were in an uncharitable mood, […]