Kiwi - a successful marketing twist

Maybe I’m still a bit young, but for me, "a Kiwi is a Kiwi"… a brown oval fruit with nice and sweet green or yellow flesh packed with vitamin C. It’s straight forward, and it’s been like this since ever. Let’s call a Spade a Spade, right? Well, I was wrong.

First time I saw one in my Mum’s kitchen I thought it was the egg of some hairy monster, and I refused to touch it. She told me that this weird thing is called a Kiwi. So I called it Kiwi too, like everyone else. But although the fruit itself has been into human diet for centuries, it acquired its name only a few decades ago.

It came to the Occident at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th. Back then it was called Chinese Gooseberry, from its similarity in taste with the European gooseberry – I guess the real name – Yang Tao –was a bit difficult to grasp.

But as time passed, we got into the Col War, and as political tension worsened, it seemed that a name reminding the “enemy” (China was not Bolshevik, but obviously Communist) was not a sells booster.

So New Zealand producers simply changed the name (some says that the move was suggested by American importers) to wipe away the negative feeling about this fruit. It was changed to Kiwifruit in 1962, and started to be used commercially in 1974. It was quickly shortened to Kiwi – except in New Zealand, where this refers to the Kiwi bird and the Kiwi people.

A pure marketing move, then. Maybe I should get people to call me Tom Cruise… Let’s see if this work as well on me as it did on the Chinese Gooseberry.

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