Foreign languages in advertising
CHAPTER 1
Sociolinguistics: investigate how society impacts language
Advertising as a laboratory: testing the prestige if a variety in advertising.
Historical overview
Foreign languages are employed in product advertisements to associate the products with ethno-
cultural stereotypes of the speakers of the foreign languages.
For example, French is associated with elegance and style
From loan words to discourse: prior to 1980 especially linguistics but after that, there was an
expansion of interest in studying foreign languages to the marketing & advertising field (also due to
globalization).
6 topics of interest were identified:
Frequency of occurrence of a foreign language (Sella, 1993)
The majority of 1200 Greek advertisements contains a foreign language. Mainly English, but
also some French and Italian.
Effects of a foreign language (Petrof, 1990)
Ads in English and French witch questions about attitudes, comprehension, intention and
recall. Results were that French (their foreign language) scored better for attitude and recall.
Foreign language as an indicator of standardization of advertisements (Mueller, 1992)
English was used as main instrument of westernization in Japanese ads: over 80% contains
English language.
Standardization: advertising execution strategies intended for one national audience are also used
for a different national audience. Most of the studies in this area have taken the perspective of
westernization.
Westernization: Western advertising execution strategies (like Caucasian models and the English
language) are applied in advertising in non-western countries.
Connections of foreign language with products, characteristic and countries (Ray et al., 1991)
Relationship between use of foreign languages and the product type and its national origin is
studied. Foreign languages seem to be used for specific products because these language
have connotations that are relevant to the product. For instance, German and Japanese are
associated with engineering quality, which is useful for cars.
Foreign branding (Leclerc et al., 1994)
bilingual brand names such as ‘Larient’ were used, that can be pronounced both in English
and in French. French brand names lead to better evaluations when they promote hedonistic
products (like nail polish) rather than utilitarian products (like petrol). Foreign languages
seem to connect with characteristics of the country where the language is typically spoken.
English versus Spanish for US Hispanics (Koslow et al., 1994)
4 types of ads. Hispanics perceived the advertiser to be more culturally sensitive when the
advertisers used (some) Spanish than when they used only English.
SO:
Solid academic interest in foreign languages in advertising, both in the business domain
(marketing, advertising) and the linguistic domain (applied linguistics, sociolinguistics,
psycholinguistics).
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, But: a lack of integration of insights from one field to the other hampers research progress.
Studies in the field of linguistics have hardly incorporated insights from marketing and
advertising.
Functions of (foreign) languages in a marketing context (integrating the various areas of interest in
foreign languages)
Snyder et al (1991): local languages express national character. The use of non-local
languages (but not English) convey foreignness. So languages and foreign languages can be
used in advertising next to other cues (cultural symbols) to express nation or foreign
character of an advertisement.
Mueller (1992): English is used to create standardized and global advertisements.
Alden et al. (1999) present a framework that captures all three function of (foreign) languages in
advertising and goals with which various languages can be used in advertising.
Brand positioning: ensuring that a brand has a unique position among its competitor brand for the
costumer.
3 different types of consumer culture positioning:
1. Local CCP: associates the brand with local cultural meanings, is portrayed as consumed by
local people in the national culture and is depicted as locally produced for local people.
2. Foreign CCP: positions the brand as symbolic of a specific foreign consumer culture. That is, a
brand whose personality, use occasion or user group are associated with a foreign culture. So
the goal is to link a product to a specific foreign country.
3. Global CCP: identifies the brand as a symbol of a given global culture. Featuring the idea that
consumers all over the world consume a particular brand or appealing to certain human
universals might invest the brand with the cultural meaning of being a conduit to feeling at
one with global culture.
Aesthetic styles, story themes and language choice (most important) are components that can be
used to express one of the 3 types of consumer culture positioning in an advertisement.
A company can use the mother tongue of the target audience if it wished to emphasize LCCP.
If the language in the ad is not the mother tongue, but a language spoken in a different country, it
is FCCP.
If the used language is English, GCCP is expected to be in play.
Related to aesthetic styles, it is LCCP if the spokesperson in an ad appears to be from the country
where the ad is published.
LCCP is used most, then GCCP and then FCCP.
But sometimes countries have more than one national language, so the idea of a single local
language for all consumers in a country is too simplistic. Also, people speak dialects and
countries host people with different linguistic backgrounds (immigrants, tourists).
LECTURE 2
Certain categorization activates a cluster of features and evaluations pertinent to that category
(experientially acquired through the media).
Stereotyping: an oversimplified set of beliefs about the characteristics of any social category that is
largely shared within a given population. The content of the stereotype is generally assumed to apply
uniformly to every individual member that belong to the category. It’s culturally bound.
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, Stereotyping is stubborn and persistent, and very often incorrect. The benefit of living by our first
impulses seems to outweigh the cost of it (being racist, sexist). Something is wired in in our culture
that makes us do this.
We do this because our brain is lazy and slow. It takes time to process the overwhelming
amount of stimuli we are confronted with at every given moment.
In some contexts, instant knowledge can save our lives. Even without knowing exactly what kind of
animal a hyena is, we activate the category DOG on the basis of similarity, and project the feature
“can bite” on the creature to classify the result is that we instinctively keep our distance.
Predictive behavior is an essential feature of human cognition. Incorrect interpretations of raced
(past tense) and houses (noun instead of verb) engender incorrect parses which become evident on
net verb (fell and married).
Predictive inferencing: the girl ate her soup with a …
Expectancy monitoring: inserting er ‘there’ to neutralize expectation of predictable subject.
This is what advertisers make use of.
Crucial is that there are at least two levels of attitude formation.
Direct experimental techniques (which elicit attitudes from participants who are aware of
that purpose) return conscious attitudes and culturally shared stereotypes.
Typically extract the most tenacious, unchanging stereotypes.
Indirect experimental techniques (in which the respondent is kept ignorant) can be used to
probe less conscious and private attitudes.
Can return changing conceptualizations
Juxtapositions of these techniques offers access into language change determinants
Indirect techniques: speaker evaluation, matched-guise technique
Basic procedure for eliciting ‘deeper’ evaluations since lambert et al. (1966). Listener-judges rate
unlabeled recorded samples of language or accent varieties on a number of evaluative scales
(speaker is attractive, intelligent, rich, nice).
On the resulting corpus of ratings factor analysis is applied to detect the inter-hearer consistencies
across evaluations which are thought to constitute the basic dimensions of the architecture of
language attitudes and evaluations.
People with the same accent have very similar evaluations.
Accent is typically the first cue you use to evaluate a person
SO
Image of the Limburg accent is much more positive in speaker evaluation than in free response task.
Reflects changing opinion on the Limburg accent, may explain why there is a growing tolerance for it
Still: not yet being imitated
Moroccan accent is imitated by Surinamese rappers and white youngsters, because you need urban
toughness for rap. The Surinamese accent is associated with other things.
Advertising
Typically makes use of public, easily accessible stereotypes that are instantly processable by
their target consumer audience (they have 30-40 seconds to form an opinion_
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