Marketing | A popular trumpet player mispronounced Oura’s name, the company got nervous – and only caused damage.

Finn Oura is mentioned in a Youtube video of a big technology influencer: to the market!

Many Finnish viewers of the Linus Tech Tips channel were delighted at the end of September, when the popular influencer published a sponsored segment about the Oura ring within his program.

In the video, the channel’s Canadian host Linus Sebastian told, among other things, how he has been using the Oura smart ring for a long time and likes the product.

But then the whole video disappeared, and the public started to wonder about it on discussion forums.

It’s about was because Oura’s marketing department had mispronounced the hepuli’s name, explained Linus Sebastian later in his second video. Because of that, the team at his media company pulled the entire video.

In the video, Sebastian originally pronounces the name in the form of “Uura”.

“I thought that the company’s name, OURA, would be pronounced ura. But it’s not like that, it’s AURA,” Sebastian says in the video.

Well, it still doesn’t quite work out.

Linus Tech Tips (LTT) is the main channel of the company’s founder, Linus Sebastian, which he started in 2013. Nowadays, it is a media company with several YouTube channels and more than 80 employees.

It has become one of the most influential and watched channels in the tech industry – and a highly sought-after channel for advertisers. The LTT channel has almost 15 million subscribers, and the most popular videos get millions of viewers.

In addition to his own media company, Linus Sebastian currently also sells fan products from hoodies to water bottles. The sale of accessory products has been a rapidly growing business for the company. For example, the New York Times reported Linus Media Group about the activity in February in his article.

The original Oura ad was on the media group’s Shortcircuit channel, which specifically publishes product videos about opening boxes. However, the portion of the video being pulled was significantly larger on Friday’s show, where Linus Sebastian and Luke Lafreniere cover the week’s technology news.

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“Even though this wasn’t really their fault, their reaction wasn’t helpful. It was not constructive.”

Fresh in the video, Sebastian explains his otherwise difficult relationship with Oura.

He already had the previous version of the ring. It was also planned to shoot a commercial about it at one time, but the collaboration fell through, and the video was never published. After the new ring model appeared, Sebastian decided to update his product to a new version, when it became available as a discount campaign for old customers.

“Many of you saw me using Oura and asked about it. Then Oura contacted me and suggested that we try making the ad again. So we filmed the video and got as far as publishing it,” says Sebastian.

After the video was published, Oura contacted Linus Media Group.

“They were clearly very upset. We offered a fix for the situation. We would explain that we mispronounced the name, but then our business department decided to pull the entire video.”

According to Sebastian, the whole deal left a bad taste in his mouth, and Linus Media Group is not going to cooperate with Oura anymore.

“Even though this wasn’t really their fault, their reaction wasn’t helpful. It was not constructive.”

In the end, Sebastian acknowledges Oura clearly irritated.

“You can’t just decide to pronounce something wrong yourself and then complain when others don’t understand.”

Ours the management refused to be interviewed by HS Vision. The company only forwarded a written statement through its Finnish communication partner.

“We greatly value our partners and are big fans of the Linus Tech Team. We always have clear and extensive guidelines for collaboration content. In this particular cooperation, the criteria according to the guidelines were not met. We asked our partner for reasonable content changes, which we unfortunately did not receive. We are disappointed with the outcome, but we are still fans of the Linus Tech Team and their content.”

Partner content made with Oura was also published on the Techlinked channel belonging to the same Linus Media Group group, whose name is pronounced correctly in the video. The video is still there visible.

Oura name pronunciation has of course been an important part of building the brand for the company itself from the very beginning. The one who built the smart ring brand at the beginning Aapo Bovellan told in an interview with HS Vision in Augustwhat was the idea behind the name.

Dynamic syllables that create the image of a user pushing himself from the couch to the jogging path, Bovellan described.

This is the “phonetic feel” that brand workers savor.

“Against this, we concluded that the name needs round vowels and a soft-sounding consonant.”

The ideation started with the letter o. It resembles a ring, and there weren’t too many well-known brand names beginning with o.

Bovellan reviewed the Japanese vocabulary. There were a few options: oshin, which is derived from the Japanese word for heart. Ora, which means gold. Not unique enough, Bovellan thought.

But the founders of the company lived in Oulu: the combination became Oura.

It resonated softly in the mouth and resembled the English word aura, which new age enthusiasts use when talking about “body energy”.

The finish was a coincidence. It turned out that there is already a city called Oura in Japan, whose spelling has a length sign above the o.

Such a macron character describes a long vowel. The same is used in the Sami languages.

Read more: This is how Aapo Bovellan made Oura the coveted status symbol: “So the name requires round vowels and soft consonants.”

Sound great. But does the brand’s pronunciation guide open up to an English-speaking audience at all?

Every Finnish company doing international business knows it: pronouncing Finnish names requires guidance. Nokia, Kone, Rovio, Outokumpu…

Professor at Hanken University of Business and Economics Jaakko Aspara points out that the company certainly has a moral right and a strategic interest to decide on the emphasis of advertising content and messages down to the details.

“But even in a general case, I wouldn’t consider the form of the brand’s statement as such that if it is said in the ad in a slightly different way than the company itself would like, then the ad should be canceled because of that,” Aspara commented.

The situation would be different if the consumer got the wrong impression from the ad about an important feature of the product. The form of brand statement is not such an important product feature.

“In this case, instead of blaming the influencer, Ouran would have been better off trying to turn the matter into a win, possibly with a little humor,” Aspara suggests.

A video made as a joke about how difficult Oura is to pronounce and how it should actually be pronounced would probably have only multiplied the attention value of the original content as well.

Although a Finnish company has the right to control the statement of its brand “even in the direction of sensitively offended prima donna-like influencers”, as Aspara puts it, it is not necessarily worth it.

By snuffing, Oura probably caused only damage.