Exploring the Influential Role of Language in Advertising
The power of language deeply influences people’s thoughts, feeling, and attitudes. It can persuade, make people feel happy or evoke disappointment – all depends on how it is used. As an inevitable part of advertisements, language in the form of slogans plays a special role in marketing campaigns. In their short and concise form, they must awake interest to the commercialised commodity, stay in mind of the consumers and, as a result, convince them of unique characteristics of an advertised product or service. Thus, being a strong part of persuasion means, slogans present an interesting subject for linguistic studies.
To attract the consumers’ attention, slogans can take different forms in advertisements. Wording, supporting image, and language choice are important components of every marketing campaign. Language choice though appears to be one of the most crucial components. As one of the methods of convincing strategy, marketing managers and agencies often decide to use a foreign language for their product campaigns. Different studies show that English appears in a large number of advertisements all around Europe. For example, when analysing advertising entries in the “Elle” magazine issued in five European countries, Gerritsen et al. (2010) found out that over 65% of the analysed entries included English. Piller's study (2003) shows that 60-70% of all advertisements broadcast in 1999 on various television networks and two national German newspapers have preferably used English of all other foreign languages. Thus, an increasing utilization of English for the advertisements in the countries, where it is a foreign language, has led to an extensive research on the functions of English in advertisements.
Scholars argue that foreign languages in the advertisements are used as a means of associating a commercialised commodity with the established stereotypes consumers have about the country these languages are spoken in. In particular English is claimed to be a trigger for the concepts of modern way of life, internationality and trendiness. The fact that these concepts are widely recognized across different countries, prompted the scholars to claim that these values are perceived by the consumers regardless their understanding of an addressed message. Approaches concerned with the functions of English in advertisements in countries that do not have English as first language give insights about the established concepts elicited by the use of English language.
Nevertheless, these approaches do not mention which effect English use in advertisements has on the consumers. Addressing the aforementioned problem, a number of surveys were conducted to investigate the effect of English use in various types of advertisements. Experimental surveys focused on the role of the comprehension on the attitudes of Dutch consumers towards advertisements in English. For example, Gerritsen et al. (2000) tested whether the perception as well as actual understanding of the respondents influences their attitude towards the commercial containing English. Another two surveys differentiated between easy and difficult slogans, which were defined in the pre-test depending on the comprehension of the study participants. As follows, slogans the meaning of which was explained better acquired a status of easy slogans, whereas misinterpreted slogans were considered as difficult ones.
On the whole, survey results note that better understood advertising messages contribute to a positive appreciation of English slogans, whereas lack of understanding demonstrated the opposite effect.
