A picture shows two couples walking on the beach. They wear brightly coloured summer outfits, they smile, and they wear sunglasses. The picture appears in an advertisement for the Austrian brand of glasses and sunglasses Silhouette. The text printed across the picture reads: ‘Relaxez vos yeux. Profitez pleinement du soleil. La protection solaire intelligente par Silhouette’. For a French-speaking audience, this text is perfectly comprehensible. However, the ad appeared in a beauty magazine targeted at a Dutch-speaking audience in the Netherlands. For this readership, the text is likely to be difficult to understand. Why would Silhouette confront Dutch readers interested in beauty and style with an ad that is fully in a language they may not understand? And why would Silhouette use a French brand name and slogan when it has an Austrian origin? A couple of years ago, the French brand Citroën advertised its C3 car in the Netherlands with the slogan ‘La vie est belle’. Although this utterance is arguably easier to understand than the text in the Silhouette ad, car dealers reported that some customers in the showroom were unable to translate it as ‘Life is beautiful’.
These two cases raise a series of questions. What role does foreign language comprehension play in advertising? How do consumers evaluate foreign languages in advertisements? Why do brands use a foreign language to communicate with their consumers? This book addresses these and other questions about how and why brands use foreign languages in advertising, and about how and why they can be effective in persuading consumers. In order to do so, this book integrates insights from marketing and advertising with theories, models, and empirical results from sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and communication studies. In this chapter, we first take a step back in time and present a historical overview of academic interest in foreign languages in advertising (Sect. 1.1). Observing a large variation in topics in this historical overview, we then present a framework that is able to accommodate this variation: consumer culture positioning strategies (Sect. 1.2). This framework will be employed to structure the core of this book, Part II, which discusses foreign languages in the light of Foreign Consumer Culture Positioning (FCCP) (Chapter 3), Global Consumer Culture Positioning (GCCP) (Chapter 4), and Local Consumer Culture Positioning (LCCP) (Chapter 5). In Sect. 1.3, we discuss the book’s aims and scope.
1.1 Academic Interest in Foreign Languages in Advertising
Academics have long been interested in the phenomenon of foreign languages in advertising. Piller (2003) gives a succinct historical overview of research in this domain. Identifying early work from the start of the twentieth century (e.g. Pound, 1913, 1951; Wustmann, 1903), Piller points out that the first publications dealt specifically with foreign loanwords. These early publications seem to be both descriptive and normative. Among other linguistic phenomena, they list and classify loanwords appearing in advertising copy. As part of an interest in word-formation techniques in trade names, Pound (1913), for instance, describes the use of the Spanish suffix ‘o’ and the definite article ‘el’ in US trade names such as ‘El Eggo’, and ‘The Perfecto cigar’. George (2003), in his book on the twentieth-century history of electric appliances in the USA, points out that Hotpoint Electric Heating Company, which produced the El Eggo egg cooker, had a larger range of electric products such as the El Perco coffee pot, and the El Comfo heating pad, all of which used the same Spanification strategy. In addition to suggesting Spanishness, Strasser (1989, p.144) cites a writer for the advertising weekly Printers’ Ink, who reports that the use of the prefix ‘el’ in these brand names ‘is also suggestive of the word “electric”’.
Piller (2003) illustrates the normative, purist perspective of early work by pointing out that Wustmann (1903) discusses foreign words as a category of language use that he considers doubtful, wrong, or ugly in the German language (and what people should use instead). Piller (2017) remarks that the first edition of this book was published in 1891; in this edition, Wustmann already commented on foreign language used by business people. He argued that business people frequently use foreign words, and that they expect them to be more prestigious than the corresponding words in German:
Weniger zu verwundern ist der Massenverbrauch von Fremdwörtern bei den Geschäftsleuten. Sie stecken natürlich infolge ihrer Halbbildung am tiefsten in dem Wahne, daß ein Fremdwort stets vornehmer sei als das entsprechende deutsche Wort. Weil auf sie selbst ein Fremdwort einen so gewaltigen Eindruck macht, so meinen sie, es müsse diesen Eindruck auf alle Menschen machen. […] Was denken sich eigentlich die Herren dabei? Denken sie sich überhaupt etwas dabei? Wer ist der Dumme? der, auf den solche Anpreisungen berechnet sind? oder der, der damit eine Wirkung zu erzielen hofft? Heikle Frage. (Wustmann, 1891, pp. 120–121)
Less surprising is the massive use of foreign words among business people. Of course, owing to their semi-education, they most deeply stick to the delusion that a foreign word is always more distinguished than the corresponding German word. Because a foreign word makes such a tremendous impression on themselves, they think it must make that impression on all people. […] What are these gentlemen actually thinking? Are they thinking anyway? Who is the stupid one? The one at whom such promotions are targeted? Or the one who hopes to achieve an effect with them? Tricky question.
Piller (2003) observes that the focus on cataloguing foreign loanwords continues until the 1980s, but that, in the meantime, an interest emerged in studying these foreign words within advertising discourse. For instance, Fink (1975) examined German participants’ understanding of English words and phrases taken from advertisements in German magazines, such as ‘Pause-Relax-System’, ‘Nice and easy’, and ‘Brush-on-Peel-off-Mask’, and analysed how this understanding depended on the participants’ age and educational background. In a follow-up study, Fink (1977) investigated German participants’ evaluations of English words and phrases, partly taken from advertisements, by asking the participants to assess these words and phrases on the basis of a list of associations, such as modern, old-fashioned, useful, useless, interesting, and boring”.
Piller’s historical review ends with the work of Haarmann (1984, 1986), who conducted pioneering research on the frequency with which foreign languages are used in advertising, and on the relationship of foreign languages with the products advertised. He argued that foreign languages are employed in product advertisements to associate the products with ethnocultural stereotypes of the speakers of the foreign languages. For instance, he remarked that French was used for specific product categories such as watches, handbags, and perfume to evoke associations such as elegance and style. Haarmann’s work has had a large impact on subsequent research on foreign languages in advertising and will be discussed in more detail in Sect. 3.3.1 of this book.
In the 1980s, academics in other domains became more interested in studying foreign languages in advertising, for instance researchers examining issues of globalization in the domain of business and advertising (for reviews, see Agrawal, 1995; Theodosiou & Leonidou, 2003). As Piller’s (2003) review does not include publications from these fields, we extended her historical review until the year 2000. In doing so, our first aim was to make an invent...