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World Englishes and Global Advertising

TEJ K. BHATIA

1 Introduction

Theodore Levitt, the business guru from Harvard, predicted in the 1980s that “The era of multinational companies customizing their products and advertising…is over.” The assumption was that in the era of rapid globalization and superbranding, advertising messages all over the globe will conform to extreme homogeneity in terms of the use of language, the display of logos, and the content of the message. English will naturally be the chosen language of global advertisers. Three decades later, although English is the most favored language of global media and advertising and its use is skyrocketing, the creative needs of global advertisers are rarely met by the consideration of global homogeneity and language conformity.

Additionally, including China and India, Asia represents one of the most robust economic regions of the world (Danker 2012). The center of goods production as well as goods consumption is shifting to Asia from Europe and North America. Global advertising has become the epicenter of the shifting marketing challenges. Thus, with superbranding and hyperglobalization going hand in hand with diversity marketing in Asia and other regions of the world (namely Africa and South America), the cross‐fertilization of world Englishes and other languages in advertising is also becoming more prominent than ever before.

2 English Users and Advertising

Since the pioneering publication of Leech (1966), there is a proliferation of studies devoted to advertising in English. Following Leech’s model, a bulk of linguistic studies concerned themselves with the linguistic and literary devices (phonology, morphology, lexis, borrowings, the clause and sentence structure, puns, metaphors, simile, and alliteration, etc.) used by advertisers. Recent works mark a point of departure in a number of ways:

Scope: In addition to works devoted to advertising in the Anglophone countries – the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia – a body of research devoted to advertising in Asia, the European Union, and South America is growing rapidly. In typological terms, following Kachru’s Three Concentric Circles model of English users, research since 1980s has crossed the threshold of the Inner Circle and has entered into the Outer Circle and the Expanding Circle. Notable works from the Three Circles are as follows: for the Inner Circle, Cook 1992; Forceville 1998; Geis 1982; Goddard 1998; Hermeren 1999; Kelly‐Holmes 2005; Myers 1999; for the Outer Circle, Bhatia 2012; and for the Expanding Circle, Haarmann 1984; Hilgendorf & Martin 2001; Hsu 2001, 2012; Jung 2001; Lee 2003; MacGregor 2003; Martin 2002a, 2002b, 2006. The boundary between the Outer and the Expanding Circles becomes rather fluid in the case of European and Asian countries.
Context: Inner Circle advertising is grounded in the monolingual context, while advertising in the other two circles capitalizes on the bilingual and multilingual environments of those countries.
Theoretical and Analytical Orientation: The primary focus of Inner Circle studies is the syntactic interface with semantics and pragmatics (Geis 1982; Vestergaard & Schroder 1985), while contact situations are key to Outer and Expanding Circle studies.
Discourse Analysis: The unit of analysis has shifted from the sentence level to discourse.
Comparative Studies: Works such as Tanaka (1994) exemplify a comparative advertising discourse of Inner and Extended Circle Englishes.
Topical focus: The topics addressed by the research include but are not necessarily limited to the following: speech acts, conversation maxims, semantic notions (e.g. presupposition, inference, implications), persuasion, and manipulation and deception. They receive significant attention in Inner Circle advertising studies, while topics such as language mixing, language attitudes, linguistic innovations, group targeting, and domain allocation are prime focuses of the other two circles. Content analysis of ads forms a common core of monolingual and bilingual ads.

Inspired by sociolinguistic and sociopsychological research on one hand, and by globalization and marketing forces on the other, the treatment of the mixing in various linguistic and media forms has gained several new dimensions during the past three decades. This chapter focuses primarily on these two latest trends, with special reference to world Englishes.

3 Key Issues

Although a number of issues (including choice of medium, media buying, and content creation) confront global advertisers from the perspectives of the topic at hand, the following three are the main concerns of international advertisers.

3.1 Standardization vs. adaptation

One of the central concerns of globalization for international advertisers is how to resolve the paradox of globalization and localization (national and regional interests, appeals, affiliations, etc.) in terms of formal and functional linguistic manifestations (see Friedman 1999 and Berger & Huntington 2002 on the general and various types of globalizations). This concern has manifested itself in the form of the “standardization” vs. “adaptation” debate in international advertising, media, and marketing. (See Bhatia 2007; Heileman 1997; Hite & Fraser 1988; Kanso 1991; Kujala & Lehtinen 1989; Mueller 1992; Onkvisit & Shaw 1987; Ryans & Ratz 1987, among others). Such issues of debate include whether logos, colors, and other iconic representations should be subjected to monolithic norms, or whether they should be adapted to regional norms, tastes, and sensitivities. Should models/actors in an ad represent a fused style with universal appeal, or mark specific western and nonwestern identities? These dichotomies are driven by the consideration of standardization vs. adaptation issue.

3.2 Language choice and language attitude

The linguistic aspect of the standardization vs. adaptation debate is the question of the most suitable linguistic vehicle for globalization and customization. There is no doubt that the question of language choice is practically resolved: English is the choice of global advertisers and marketers. English has effectively dethroned its competitor languages, such as French and Russian, and continues to do so with more vigor and dynamism, thus becoming the single most important language of globalization. Indeed, a cursory examination of world advertising reveals that ad writers and marketers subscribe to bilingualism, either consciously or unconsciously. And they view English as the most suitable linguistic tool for promoting global bilingualism.

Although the language choice is settled, the question of which variety of English is appropriate is still very much alive, in fact is gaining more prominence than ever before in view the shifting economic pendulum toward Asia. English is undergoing dynamic changes in the process of engendering and shaping global market discourse; this has important ramifications for international advertising media and marketing on one hand, and for world Englishes on the other.

3.3 Audience reach and modality choice

One of the serious challenges that confront international advertisers is two pronged: (a) how to tap not only emerging middle‐class markets; and (b) how to tap what are known as “new emergent hot markets” in international business, dubbed B2–4B (Business to 4 Billion). The hot new advertising market is to reach four billion people worldwide. With the saturation of traditional urban and domestic markets, marketers are searching for new markets. Rural and semirural areas in countries such as India, China, and Brazil are potential “hot markets.” The urgent problem for advertisers, then, is how to reach the new consumers who are linguistically and geographically dispersed. How do you reach target audiences that live in 637,000 villages and speak scores of different officially recognized languages? The simple solution is to make use of conventional mass media – television, radio, and print. However, the reach of conventional media is limited in a number of ways due to the skyrocketing costs; geographical, linguistic, and social barriers; and limited or no reach (lack of signal towers and frequent power failures) of electronic media in some parts of the world. This issue requires unconventional approaches to modes of communication and message transmission. Bhatia (2000, 2007) details nonconventional mediums (e.g. wall advertising, video van, and others) that are used by global advertisers in India and other developing countries to reach the new audience. The issue of local language choice and/or national or world varieties of Englishes in unconventional media gains new perspectives in the overall debate on standardization vs. adaptation. Social media reaching out to the new millennial generation has added yet another dimension to the choice of modality.

4 Approaches

In addition to linguistic and semantic/pragmatic approaches, theoretical and analytical frameworks for advertising analysis are as diverse as the fields concerned with the interactions of language and society – sociolinguistics (Halliday 1978; Kachru 1981; Labov 1972), ethnography of speaking (Hymes 1974), sociology of language (Fishman 1972), critical discourse analysis (van Dijk 1985), semiotics (Barthes 1977; Foucault 1981), speech accommodation (Giles, Coupland, & Coupland 1991), optimization theory (Bhatia 2011), and language and ideology (Fowler 1993; Thompson 1978), communication (Myers 1999), among others. See Bhatia (2000: 108–19 and 2007) for detailed discussions.

By way of methodology, both qualitative and quantitative techniques are employed by researchers. Data collection methods include such random sampling, judgmental sampling, nonprobability sampling, and stratified random sampling drawn from both conventional and nonconventional advertising. In addition to interview and survey methods, experimental techniques are also employed. Experimental techniques have been the salient feature of psycholinguistic aspects of advertising research to investigate issues such as ad content memory, biscriptal processing, and frame switching (Luna 2011; Samiee & Jeong 1994). The main concern of psycholinguistic research is to address issues pertaining message appeal (sentiment analysis), language processing, and memory and product name recall (Ahn & La Ferle 2008). In recent years, these types of research have begun to align themselves with the multilingual nature of advertising.

5 Multiple Mixing and World Englishes

Observing the patterns of advertising outside the Inner Circle, Pillar (2003) notes that advertising functions as a site for language contact. For instance, advertising can be seen as intrinsically a mixed medium – a mixture of written‐spoken forms, text‐image mixing, language‐music, etc. Even Inner Circle advertising shows some openness to language mixing. The addition of a few diacritics or some phonological/syntactic adaptations lends monolingual ads the flavor of French, German, or other European languages (e.g. L’Eggs, El Cheapo, Norishe). Besides this low‐level cosmetic mixing, the more frequent and dominant trend in global advertising is the high‐level fusion which manifests itself in the following four ways:

Mixing of world Englishes
Mixing of world English accents
Mixing of English with other languages
Mixing of English with non‐Roman scripts

5.1 Mixing of world Englishes

The influence of British and American advertising on global advertising is so significant that Inner Circle Englishes seem to be exercising a melting‐pot effect on global Englishes. In addition to the common lexicon (drawn from fashion, entertainment, beverages, food, sports, music, and other sources of popular culture), the use of structures such as a string of noun phrases (Oak Wood Furniture Express), negative structures (no hassle no payment), and discourse styles (informationalization, promotional discourse, cold‐call scripting; see Goodman & Graddol 1996: 141–157) reflect the important ways in which the qualitative aspects of global advertising is undergoing homogenization (Bhatia & Ritchie 2004, 2012). Nevertheless, it would be premature to claim that the influence of Inner Circle English is unidirectional, that is, from the Inner Circle to the Outer and Expanding Circles. Linguistic innovations outside the UK, Canada, and the United States have left a lasting influence on Inner Circle English advertising. The bidirectional accommodation and mutually feeding relationship of global Englishes is the salient feature of international advertising, as shown in Figure 34.1:

Diagram of global English typology displaying a solid ellipse labeled language mixing having two-headed arrows linking to 3 solid surrounding ellipses labeled inner circle, outer circle, and expanding circle. — **Figure 34.1** Global English typology: mutually feeding relationship.

5.2 Product naming and world Englishes

Nowhere is the pattern of mixing of the world Englishes more obvious than in the area of product naming. The success story of the walkman (invented by Japanese advertisers) is a case in point. Although it was initially met with great skepticism in the larger English‐speaking world, its innovative appeal silenced puritans and skeptics. Now it has become not only a part of the global English lexicon but also a model of a very productive strategy in product naming in international advertising.

What is even more interesting is that, so pressing is the need for product naming through English, that a little more a decade ago, the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) determined that there are not enough names for the hundreds of soft drinks being produced in Japan. To fill this gap, the emergency use of English‐sounding nonsense words (McKeldin 1994: 71) such as posmic and Cham‐pe was approved by the government. It was no accident that the choice of language for filling such a gap was English.

In the Outer and Expanding Circles, product naming and company naming are the domains for which English is the most favored language. Bhatia (1987: 35) shows English performs an overwhelming function in product naming. Based on the analysis more than 1200 advertisements, primarily in Hindi, that were printed between 1975 and 1985, the study revealed that more than 90% of the 1200 advertisements analyzed carried a product name in English. It is also true even of products for rural market where familiarity with and literacy in English are minimal. The following leading soap/detergent brand names, current in India, are drawn overwhelmingly from English: Arial, Cinthol, Det, Gnat, Lux, Lifebuoy, Magic, Bonus, Liril, Margo, Palmolive, Rexona, Sunlight, Surf, Wheel, Marvel, Crowing Glory, and Ponds. (Two notable exceptions are Nirma and Hamam.) Meraj (1993: 224) shows a similar trend in Urdu advertising in Pakistan. Her sample reveals that English product names account for 70% of the ads, while only 9% of product names were drawn from Urdu. The remaining 21% were mixed product names (English + Urdu) such as Chanda Battery Cell, Good Luck Haleem, and National Kheer. The same trend is widely attested in Russia and other European countries. Thonus (1991) identifies 10 different structural types of English‐Portuguese hybrid product and business names. In Japan and Korea, English product names qualified with English first‐person possessive pronouns (my juice, my car) are frequent. The possessive pronoun can be further subjected to reduplication (MyMy Workman, advertising a workbench).

While Inner Circle English is enriching other Englishes, it is in turn being enriched by product names drawn from other languages: Nike (Greek), Volvo (Latin), Samsara (Sanskrit), and Nokia (Finnish). The mutually feeding relationships among the world’s Englishes is shown in Figure 34.1.

5.3 Mixing of world Englishes accents

The incidence of accent mixing in global advertising ranges from standard to nonstandard accents at national and international levels. In television commercials from the Inner Circle, the mixing of local/regional accents is utilized not only to generate local appeals and identities but also to render sociopsychological effects such as trustworthiness of the product advertised and the sincerity on the part of advertisers/actors. A case in point is the use of a Southern accent in US advertising. In global advertising, on the other hand, a wide variety of national/European accents are employed to enhance the international appeal of the product. For example, McDonald’s does not exclusively rely on standard British or American English accents to invoke the international branding of its product and company. According to Pillar (2003: 177), “it seems that some of the major brands may actually be moving away from the exclusive use of English. At the time of writing, McDonald’s, for instance, is running an advertising campaign in Australia that features a commercial set in Italy, with characters using a few Italian words and manifesting a heavy Italian accent in English.” Such a move is crucial for global indexing as opposed to asserting either British or American identity. Due to the overt phonetic component, ethnocultural stereotypes are marked often by means of world English accents. For instance, images of holy men, immigrant cabdrivers, and food often invite the use of an Indian accent in English.

5.4 English mixing in non‐English advertising

In contrast to the use of symbolic or mocking uses of foreign languages in Inner Circle English advertising, the qualitative and quantitative patterns of mixing with English in non‐Inner Circle English advertising is significant. Bhatia and Ritchie (2004: 530–534; 2016: 579–582) show that besides product names, English has found its way in the structural domains of advertising, such as in attention‐getters, company logos and names, packaging and labeling, pricing, slogans, and even the main body of the text. The acquisition of such domains signifies the power of English in Outer and Expanding Circle advertising.

In a cross‐linguistic study of advertising, Bhatia (1992) showed that the mixing with English is a near‐universal tendency. Subsequent studies confirm this claim. Martin (2006) shows in her study of more than 7,000 French television commercials, print ads, and billboards that English is widely used. The increasing use of English is particularly notable in cosmetic and beauty‐product advertising in France. Given the international status of French, the linguistic rivalry between French and English, and the linguistic attitudes of French speakers and the French academy, it is particularly surprising to find English in a domain in which French has asserted its supremacy, authority, and international status for centuries.

Attention‐getters also favor the use of English over French. Expressions such as advanced cream, extra help makeup, and multi‐protection are being consistently used not only as attention‐getters but also in the body of French advertisements in the context of offering explanations for the merits of the product in question (Bhatia 1992). The same pattern is emerging with more vigor than ever before in Asia (see, for Japan, Takashi 1990, 1992, and Wilkerson 1997; for Korea, Jung 2001 and Lee 2003; for Taiwan, Hsu 2001, 2012) and in European countries besides France (for Switzerland, see Cheshire & Moser 1994; for Spain, Aldea 1987; for France and Germany, Hilgendorf & Martin 2001; for Russia, Ustinova 2001, and Ustinova & Bhatia 2005).

In considering the quantitative aspects, what is the proportion of English language material in non‐English advertisements? According to a Dutch study, one‐third of the commercials on Dutch television contain English words (Gerritsen, Korzilius, Meurs, & Gijsbers 2000). Based on the analysis of 658 German commercials broadcast in 1999, Pillar (2001) shows that 73.4% made use of a language other than German, with English having a major share of the pie. Bajko (1999) concludes that the use of English became dominant in the 1990s in German advertising (Pillar 2003: 174).

In short, mixing with English is not only nearly universal but has been rapidly on the increase in quantitative as well as qualitative terms since globalization became the marketing mantra.

6 Laws and Regulations

To restrain the use of English in advertising, some countries have enacted regulatory statues. A case in point is the Loi Toubon in France, which came into effect in 1994. Articles 2 and 12 of this law aim at restricting the use of English in the French media. Article 12 requires any foreign language words in advertising to be accompanied by their corresponding equivalents in French with the following condition: the equivalents in French must be as legible, audible, or intelligible as the foreign‐language version (Martin 2006). The law safeguards the use of French against English in French media and advertising. The newly independent countries of the ex‐Soviet Union have similar regulations in place. In countries such as Lithuania and Armenia, government regulations include language police, who play a crucial role in confining the influx of English.

7 World Englishes in Roman Scripts (Monoscripting) and Language Attitudes

The extent of English usage in global advertising is more than what meets the eye. In Asian and European countries, it is a common practice to write English lexical items in non‐Roman scripts such as Hangul (Korea); Katakana (Japan); Devanagari, Gurmukhi, or a number of other Indic language scripts; and Arabic (India, Pakistan, and Arabic‐speaking countries). Of course, Roman and non‐Roman script mixing is also a common sight. Clearly, such ads are aimed at consumers who may not be fluent or even literate in English. On the surface, this might appear to be counterintuitive and counterproductive. However, at the deeper level, this practice is reflective of an underlying assumption or unconscious planning on the part of national or international advertisers who expect their readers to be somewhat bilingual in English. This is in agreement with their conception of global citizen: in order to be a global citizen, some knowledge of English is a prerequisite.

Not only is English, with or without Roman letters, introduced, but an attempt is also made not to deprive consumers of the meaning and pronunciation of English phrases by employing strategies such as paraphrasing or translating English expressions into local script. How does one introduce English in countries such as Japan, where the incidence of bilingualism with English is perhaps less than 1%? In the ad in Figure 34.2, right above the English expression (“Final Stage Premium”) the pronunciation guide for Japanese consumers is in the katakana script.

Image described by caption and surrounding text. — **Figure 34.2** English expression and its pronunciation guide in katakana.

What is interesting about such practices is that not only does script mixing and English mixing in non‐Roman scripts set the stage for bilingualism, but it also provides a fertile ground for the mixing of native and nonnative Englishes. For instance, the pronunciation guide in the ad adapts the target English expression with a CVCV phonological adaptation. The main functions of script mixing are summarized in Table 34.1 below.

Table 34.1 Script mixing in global advertising – Functions.

Covert	Overt
Bilingualism through English Positive linguistic attitudes toward English	Mixing of native and nonnative Englishes Paraphrasing, reiteration, pun, other stylistic functions Structural Linguistic Accommodation

8 Determinants and Functions of World Englishes

The quantitative and qualitative pattern of use of English worldwide has added yet another, invisible dimension to English, which can be termed the “mystique factor.” English mixing is not motivated by low‐level considerations such as borrowing, that is, the use of English to fill a lexical gap in the host language. After all, is there a language in the world which lacks an equivalent of English words such as new, design, or juice? The use of English is motivated by deeper, creative desires on the part of advertisers (see Martin 2006 on the perception of English as a powerful creative tool for French advertisers and copy writers). English is considered to be a “cool” language capable of rendering audience identity (as international, modern, rational, objective, etc.) and appeal of the product (as standard, American, or British). For more details see Bhatia and Ritchie (2004, 2012).

In addition to rendering the sociopsychological features and indexing identities, mixing with English performs other literary and psycholinguistic functions such as rhyming (Trentenaire On Air—a French radio station ad); reduplication (MyMy Workman in a Korean ad); puns (must with two meanings: English “must” and Hindi must ‘crazy’); humor and slogans (changing value systems: a slogan such as “Freedom is my birth right” is aimed at gender equality and empowerment). These functions have immense psycholinguistic power since they play important roles in product recall and information primacy effects. These are special effects and creative meanings which advertisers strive for. Creativity through English enables them to conquer any negative social evaluation of mixing.

The aim of an ad is to inform and persuade consumers to buy a product. But these two aims do not carry equal weight. In the process of persuading consumers, ads sometimes go overboard, either intentionally or unintentionally, and the boundary between creativity and deception becomes blurred. Holbrook (1978) and Shimp (1983) distinguish between factual and evaluative advertising. Factual advertising refers to factual claims in a real world situation, like pricing, packaging, and product attributes. The truth value or validity of factual advertising claims can easily be assessed. In contrast, evaluative advertising refers to what is called in the advertising register “puffery.” Puffery refers to those aspects of advertising that make it more like an art. It makes subjective claims that can neither be empirically proved nor disproved.

The use of English for deceptive purposes is no longer limited to the Anglophone countries. With English quickly becoming the near‐universal language of product naming, and the forces of globalization (top‐down and bottom‐up) at work, English is leading in the global deception race. In rural India, for example, English has become a powerful weapon of deliberate deception. Even leading brand‐name products such as Lifebuoy and Boroline are not spared. Relying heavily on copied logos and other visual signs, deceptive marketers change a letter of the product name in English and deceive villagers into thinking that they are buying a brand‐name product. Lifebuoy is spelled as Lifeboy and Boroline as Boriline to cheat the unsuspecting villager. Such problems are not unique to rural India; the growing role of deception involving English product names is a pervasive phenomenon.

9 Globalization: Resolving the Global vs. Local Paradox

As pointed out earlier, as urban markets reach the point saturation and conventional advertising loses its punch, international marketers are turning to new and emerging semiurban and rural markets of Asia, Africa, and South America. This trend marks the process of globalization from the bottom up, which calls for a new approach to marketing communication and innovative ways of reaching the potential four billion new consumers. Although mass media are very popular around the globe, the search for unconventional ways to send commercial messages is gaining prominence. In many countries of Asia and Africa, wall advertising/painting is quite popular, not only with local/regional/national advertisers but also international advertisers. What might appear to be graffiti to a Western eye, wall advertising, is a very powerful form of reaching rural audiences (see Bhatia 2000 and 2007 for more details on the structure, power, and reach of this media modality). This section discusses globalization with special reference to this media modality to demonstrate the scope and magnitude of the impact of world Englishes in global advertising.

What is intriguing to observe is that advertisers, either unconsciously or by design, have developed two distinct models of globalization in relation to localization, which, in turn, governs their linguistic representational strategies and linguistic choices. These views can be characterized as “competitive” and “cooperative.” The two views naturally lead to two distinct underlying linguistic representational strategies in global advertising: the competitive view leads to language segregation, whereas the integrative view yields language mixing. Language segregation is the natural outcome of the perception of globalization and localization as oppositions, while language integration is the consequence of the perceived accommodation between the two. The perceived models of globalization and its linguistic renderings are summarized in Table 34.2.

Table 34.2 Models of globalization – Competitive and cooperative.

Model	Approach	Language/Script	Text
Competitive	either‐or	one	monolingual
Cooperative	mixed	two or more	bilingual or multilingual

Based on these two models, three distinct patterns are evident in advertising worldwide. The first two patterns lend themselves to language separation.

9.1 Think global and act global

This pattern is carried out by means of English only, preferably by native varieties of English in Roman letters. Global brands which subscribe to this type of advertising include Coca‐Cola, Pepsi, and Nike. Both top‐down and bottom‐up globalization reflect this approach. Following the Standardization model of international advertising, Coke and Pepsi display their brands both in nonconventional and conventional media forms. Global advertisers have begun to paint walls in rural India so vigorously that no standing structure is spared. In 2000, when Coke and Pepsi ads appeared painted on rocks on the 33‐mile stretch of the road between Manali and the Rohtang Pass in an ecologically sensitive area of the Himalayan region of India, environmental groups filed a legal suit against those companies, charging them with violation of the forest Conservation Act of India (Bagla 2002).

9.2 Think local and act local

On the opposite end of the Think‐Global‐and‐Act‐Global ads fall the Think‐Local‐and‐Act‐Local type. These ads strive for hyperlocalization through local languages and indigenous scripts and illustrate the strategy of glocalization through language mixing.

Some ads depart from the exclusive “think global and act global” strategy and make room for globalization by way of bridging with localization. Reaching masses of consumers by means of local languages and scripts paves the way for safe and less risky globalization appeals. Although the approaches are overtly mutually exclusive both in conceptual and linguistic terms, the localization‐to‐globalization gap is bridged primarily by nonlinguistic means – either by sharing logographic properties of the product or by maintaining a common color scheme.

Rather than relying on visual cues and an indirect approach, some ads rely on content‐sensitive means to induce some degree of globalization. A case in point is an ad for Aral Engine Oil, a German product (Figure 34.3):

(1)	araal –	jarmanii	kaa	nambar	ek	injan	aail.
	Aral	Germany	of	number	one	engine	oil.
	“Aral – the number one German engine oil.”

The message has a topic‐comment structure. The topic, Aral (the product name) is separated from the comment – the number one German engine oil – by the abutment dividing the two portions of the wall. The entire ad is in the Devanagari script, and the grammatical markers are those of Hindi. The suggestion of global appeal is brought about by the content of the comment structure. The affiliation part contains information about the Germanic association of the product, and the evaluation part asserts that the product is the number‐one product.

Image described by surrounding text. — **Figure 34.3** Glocalization: context sensitive.

Rather than pitting global appeals against local or satisfying themselves with minimal content (as in standardized ads displaying just one word – Coke, Pepsi), the unmarked pattern, both on qualitative and quantitative grounds, in global advertising is that advertisers break the barriers imposed by linguistic segregation and attempt to integrate the globalization and localization themes by integrating the participating linguistic systems and their scripts. This is an optimization strategy which subscribes to the “think and act both global and local at the same time” approach, which renders optimization in the strength and appeal of their messages. One of the outcomes of this strategy is the increased use of Inner Circle Englishes together with national and local Englishes, on the one hand, and the creation of their own modes of and standards of mixing English, on the other. Staba stands for Starbucks Coffee in Japan, MacDonald’s is called either Mac (in the Tokyo area) or Macdo (in western areas, e.g. around Osaka and Nagoya). The process of globalization from the bottom up has opened the floodgates to English in those remote parts of the world which were earlier out of reach.

9.3 Cross‐cultural translations and intelligibility

Cross‐cultural translations are another salient feature of globalization. The question of appropriateness and acceptance of world Englishes in advertising figures prominently in two contexts: cross‐cultural translational mishaps and intelligibility of Inner Circle English commercials for Outer and Expanding Circle consumers.

A case in point is a Camilan Permanent Marker ad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klYaARdwJyE). The ad is grounded in Indian culture and employs cultural symbols such as bindi, a vermillion red dot on the forehead, which signifies the married status of a woman. Other symbols of marriage such as red bangles and a necklace are also used in the ad. The ad is 100% Indian in terms of the depiction of Indian culture, particularly through a rural setting, as well as in cultural clothing and religious rituals. The main theme is that the husband of a young wife dies. Rodalis (professional female mourners) are brought in; they destroy her bangles and necklace and attempt to wipe off the vermillion red dot, the ultimate symbol of her marriage (and of her living husband). However, the red refuses to vanish since it has been painted on with Indian Camlin Permanent Marker. Naturally then, the husband cannot die; all of a sudden he starts breathing and he becomes alive. A happy ending is brought about by the use of the advertised product!

However, the ad was despised by women, including professional mourners, because it triggers a cultural asymmetry frame in the minds of the audience in that the power of the product supersedes the power of an Indian woman, who can save her husband from the clutches of death. However, in social media the ad appears in the category “Funny ads”. One of the reasons for the ad’s failure was the fundamental lack of cultural awareness on the part of the ad’s creators, who failed to see that it would undermine the power of the Indian woman. The Rodalis, professional mourners, are dressed in black saris. However, white, not black, is the color of mourning in India, particularly among Hindus and Sikhs.

Translation mishaps and blunders and product failures within and outside the English‐speaking countries have been a major concern about cross‐cultural advertising on the part of global advertisers, media practitioners, and marketers. When the Scandinavian makers of the Electrolux vacuum cleaner wanted to promote their product in the USA, they used the slogan “Nothing sucks like an Electrolux.” The negative connotation of the verb “sucks” in American English did not add to the success of the product. The same is true of Japanese product names such as Calpis Water and Pocari Sweat. They are perfectly acceptable lexical innovations for Japanese consumers, but not in markets of the Inner Circle English countries. In India, Eveready Torch is an acceptable product name of a flashlight, but for the speakers of American English, it flashes a picture of arson, aggression, and violence. A sign for “chilled beer” is written as “Child Bear” (Figure 34.4) in an Indian shop. A sign “sex shop” for a store in China is not a taboo; such stores sell herbal teas and other general health products, such as vitamins. However, such naming choices highlight the problems of intelligibility and lexical semantic asymmetries across world varieties of English. Hence, some studies, such as that by Gerritsen et al. (2000), are concerned with the consumers’ comprehension of Inner Circle English commercials.

Photo displaying an Indian shop with a sign “Child Bear.” Two men and a motorcycle are observed in front of the shop. A truck is observed at the right side. — **Figure 34.4** Glocalization of English: adaptation of chilled beer.

10 Conclusion

International advertising and media are fertile grounds for the mixing of world Englishes, on one hand, and the mixing of English and other languages on the other. Contrary to the expectations and predictions of market gurus and proponents of the standardization strategy, even in the age of superbranding and hyperglobalization, international advertising does not exclusively favor the use of Inner Circle Englishes. Language mixing in general and the mixing of world Englishes in particular is an open secret of international advertising which enables international advertisers to optimize the strength and the appeal of their messages in terms of audience identity construction, product branding, and sociopsychological rendering of both audience and products.

In order to tap into the conscious and unconscious knowledge which plays a critical role in the creation of ads, it is imperative to understand the complex process of making an ad. How do features of market research and product positioning map onto an ad copy? How is an ad adapted or created cross‐culturally in the age of hyperglobalization by making visual and linguistic choices? In order to answer these questions and gain insights into the process of standardization and/or adaptation of cross‐cultural ads, interdisciplinary research and dialogue among the users of world Englishes and international advertisers is needed. Marketing research on the linguistic aspects (including the use of English) suffers from conceptual and analytical oversimplification (e.g. the treatment of English mixing as loans; the inability to distinguish between matrix language vs. embedded language), which interdisciplinary research can rectify. Research on the use of world Englishes in nonconventional media, audience reaction, and attitudes toward nonconventional media and world Englishes is still in the infant stage and so is the state of research on social media and world Englishes. In order to gain proper perspectives into the pluralistic nature of world Englishes/global communication and the advertising media, the integration of conceptual, analytical, and experimental frameworks is imperative at the interdisciplinary level.

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