Anyone who has ever traveled internationally or has even placed an overseas telephone call knows the potential pitfalls that come with communicating in a language other than one’s own. When vacationing abroad, accidental miscues can result in erendipitous adventures and good stories to tell back home.

After WWII, Germany’s Volkswagen began to show up in the U.S., lovingly called “the Bug.” In English, “Volkswagen” means “the people’s car,” very much what is now being manufactured by the Tata Motor company in India to serve Asian markets, in which industrialization is creating the world’s fastest-growing demand for automobiles. The Tata car is designed to sell in India for $2,500.

You can tell a lot about the general media usage of a middle-class Chinese person by looking at how and where they use the Internet. That’s what we are learning from our first Leo J. Shapiro & Associates national poll of China, conducted in March, 2006.

China has a preponderance of consumers whose income is growing more rapidly than their propensity to spend. Marketers have an enormous opportunity to stimulate consumer spending in China, as they did in the USA following World War II.