Made In America - Bill Bryson [160]
If we fall for such commercial manipulation, we have no one to blame but ourselves. When Kentucky Fried Chicken introduced ‘Extra Crispy’ chicken to sell alongside its ‘Original’ chicken, and sold it at the same price, sales were disappointing. But when its advertising agency persuaded it to promote ‘Extra Crispy’ as a premium brand and to put the price up, sales soared. Much the same sort of verbal hypnosis was put to work for the benefit of the fur industry. Dyed muskrat makes a perfectly good fur, for those who enjoy cladding themselves in dead animals, but the name clearly lacks style. The solution was to change the name to ‘Hudson seal’. Never mind that the material contained not a strand of seal fur. It sounded good, and sales skyrocketed.
Truth has seldom been a particularly visible feature of American advertising. In the early 1970s, Chevrolet ran a series of ads for the Chevelle, boasting that the car had ‘109 advantages to keep it from becoming old before its time’. When looked into, it turned out that these 109 vaunted features included such items as rear-view mirrors, reversing lights, balanced wheels and many other such items that were considered pretty well basic to any car. Never mind; sales soared. At about the same time, Ford, not to be outdone, introduced a ‘limited edition’ Mercury Monarch at $250 below the normal list price. It achieved this by taking $250 worth of equipment off the standard Monarch.21
And has all this deviousness led to a tightening of the rules concerning what is allowable in advertising? Hardly. In 1986, as William Lutz relates in Doublespeak, the insurance company John Hancock launched an ad campaign in which ‘real people in real situations’ discussed their financial predicaments with remarkable candour. When a journalist asked to speak to these real people, a company spokesman conceded that they were actors and ‘in that sense they are not real people’.22 During the 1982 presidential election campaign, the Republican National Committee ran a television advertisement praising President Reagan for providing cost-of-living pay increases to federal workers ‘in spite of those sticks-in-the-mud who tried to keep him from doing what we elected him to do’. When it was pointed out that the increases had in fact been mandated by law since 1975 and that Reagan had in any case three times tried to block them, a Republican official responded: ‘Since when is a commercial supposed to be accurate?’23 Quite.
In linguistic terms, perhaps the most interesting challenge facing advertisers today is that of selling products in an increasingly multicultural society. Spanish is a particular problem, not just because it is spoken over such a widely scattered area but also because it is spoken in so many different forms. Brown sugar is azucar negra in New York, azucar prieta in Miami, azucar morena in much of Texas, and azucar pardo pretty much everywhere else24 – and that’s just one word. Much the same bewildering multiplicity applies to many others. In consequence, embarrassments are all but inevitable.
In mainstream Spanish bichos means insects, but in Puerto Rico it means testicles, so when a pesticide maker promised to bring death to the bichos Puerto Rican consumers were at least bemused, if not alarmed. Much the same happened when a maker of bread referred to its product as un bollo de pan and discovered that to Spanish-speaking Miamians of Cuban extraction that means a woman’s private parts. And when Perdue Chickens translated its slogan ‘It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken’ into Spanish, it came out as a slightly less macho: ‘It takes a sexually