Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

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 super-branding, advertising messages all over the globe will conform to extreme homogeneity in terms of the use of language, the display of logo, and the content of the message. English will naturally be the chosen language of global advertisers. Two decades later, although English is the most favored language of global media and advertising and its use is skyrocketing, creative needs of global advertisers are rarely met by the consideration of global homogeneity and language conformity. Thus, with super-branding and hyper-globalization going hand in hand with diversity marketing, the crossfertilization of world Englishes and other languages in advertising is also becoming more prominent than ever before. Since the pioneering publication of Leech (1966) , there has been 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, 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: (1) Scope: ... log in or subscribe to read full text