The Misguided Power of English?

Global brands tend not to vary the language of slogans. ‘Just Do It’ works for Nike across the planet. Never mind the meaning, feel the slogan. Repeated time and time again it is as powerful as the brand name itself, conveying the personality, the culture, the value of the brand. In terms of the rest of the advertising mix, the slogan can endure for years while other elements change. That’s the wonder of a brand proposition for you. But the likes of Nike are the likes of Nike. Why does a fitness studio in Palma feel it necessary to use an English slogan? Is it just faddishness, or what? Possibly, but there can also be a desire to apparently add quality and prestige to whatever is being promoted by using English.

Back in 2016 something of a debate was kicked off by a study of print and television advertising conducted by the Royal Spanish Academy and the Academy of Advertising. This discovered that 322 brands use English systematically. This English prevalence, it was noted, was for a country - Spain - where proficiency in English was among the lowest in the EU. It wasn’t only foreign brands doing this; over eight per cent of Spanish brands were using English. The chances are that, nine years on, this is considerably higher.

The president of the Academy of Advertising, Fernando Herrero, was of the view that “we” (the Spanish) pretend to know English, “because we’re hicks”. He gave a restaurant example. “Would you rather have lunch with friends at a ‘restaurante parrilla’ or at ‘lunch and grill’?” They basically mean the same, but one of the authors of the study reckoned many Spaniards would opt for ‘lunch and grill’ because it sounds more classy.

Other ways of putting it might be chic or glamorous, the president of the Royal Spanish Academy, Dario Villanueva, having been of the view that even if people don’t understand the meaning, they will buy a product with English usage because it makes them appear to be chic. Villanueva was particularly annoyed by the study’s findings. “This situation deeply disgusts me.” He was of the opinion that it demonstrated a Spanish inferiority complex, “and so we resort to English as if it confers superiority”.
At the time of this study, it was noted that Anglicisms weren’t only common in advertising. Nightclubs were using English. So also, for instance, were beauty parlours. In a way, in a lifestyle sense, the beauty parlour isn’t a million miles away from a fitness studio. The authors of the study made a plea for advertisers and society to increase the use of Spanish. The plea, by what one can see on an everyday basis, fell on deaf ears.

Car manufacturers were among the most likely to use English; 65% of brands had English slogans. There again, these are multinationals with their global brand propositions to think about. But the automotive industry once offered one of the best examples of all this in reverse. In German rather than Spanish, this was Audi’s ‘Vorsprung durch Techik’. It was an old Audi slogan that was updated, and the humour that was applied to the ads in the UK in the 1980s made it stick. Did it matter if people understood it? No, and Geoffrey Palmer’s droll sign-offs at the end of each ad recognised this - “As they say in Germany”.

John Hegarty of the BBH agency, who came up with the idea, once observed that the slogan said everything but also nothing. It didn’t matter, as people attached their own meaning to it. This said, the recognition had much to do with the uniqueness of the approach, a uniqueness that can’t be said to apply to all the English slogans that are knocking around.

These might convey something classy, to use Fernando Herrero’s example, but a more recent study (2023) by the Academy of Advertising showed that the power of the slogan can be lost even among Spaniards who are bilingual (Spanish and English). This neuromarketing study tested students undertaking business, economics and marketing courses at two universities. It found that the slogan’s effectiveness was far greater if it was in the native language, i.e. Spanish, leading to the conclusion that the consumer will have that much closer an affinity with the brand if it is in the native language, despite the message in English being perfectly well understood. Find your inner power of what? The language?