14/11/2014

“Casual fashion for a casual life”. There’s something not quite right about Tom Tailor’s former slogan. As with most of its campaigns, it’s written in English, promoting the broader American feel about the company. Most Germans think Tom Tailor is based in the US, a perception supported by its thoroughly un-German name – few would suspect that its head office is in the sleepy Hamburg suburb of Niendorf, characterised by its predominance of elderly people and startlingly nondescript architecture.

Bleak is chic in Niendorf Market

The majority of people here speak English – indeed, most of them slip it into their everyday speech without thinking. Words like “service”, “show” and “download” are liable to crop up in otherwise purely German sentences, just as “I don’t know” is a perfectly legitimate German response to questions. But though bilingualism is impressively prevalent here, few speak English to a level of fluency and linguistic confidence to recognise the many minor oddities in English language advertising here.

Let’s take a look at “casual fashion for a casual life”. If it were “casual fashion for a casual lifestyle”, it’d be beyond criticism (barring appraisal of the actual effectiveness of the message). But a “casual life” isn’t a thing. It sounds like a life of not being bothered. A life you only show up to when nothing else is on. If your eulogy featured a reference to the “casual life” you’d led, your legacy would be in pretty dire straits. Of course, it’d be a great campaign for a company targeting the existentially noncommittal – but after six weeks of working with the company, I’m pleased to say that our customer base isn’t quite so narrowly definable. Accordingly, my native English-speaking boss killed the campaign as quickly as he could.

But he might just as well have spared himself the effort. German consumers capable of this sort of hair-splitting are few and far between; most will see “casual + fashion + life”, and run with the gist of the message. Even those who harbour doubts about the formulation are likely to shrug their shoulders and accept it – after all, who are they to correct the Americans at Tom Tailor?

This I think allows for an interesting linguistic phenomenon to develop in commercial advertising: the license to sound foreign. It doesn’t matter if the sentences are stilted from the perspective of a native English speaker – the targeted German consumers will have much less of an appetite for criticism.  As long as you strike the right buzzwords or catchphrases, the ideas will come through even if the phrasing is patchy. 

The phenomenon can be witnessed all over this city. Tom Tailor provides another specimen with our “You better believe (kn)it” campaign, in which we exhort customers to cast their doubts aside and affirm their faith in textile manufacture. At least, that’s what the message literally implies. The benchmark standard of puns drops significantly when you permit yourself to sound foreign – your claims can be unapologetically nonsensical, as long as they’re more or less familiar-sounding.

Now I'm a beweaver.

A Marlboro ad on my route to work is another good example. It displays a biker in the middle of the desert on the left side, then on the right a couple of packs of cigarettes and the message “Maybe I will do it my way”. With “maybe” struck out. As if the biker opened his diary one afternoon, wrote the sentence complete with the “maybe”, then reconsidered, and in a devil-may-care act of brazen defiance drew a red cross over it.

Scorching intransigence from the smokers

Or my HanseNet mouse pad from Customer Services at the Alsterhaus. The more I look at this one, the less I understand it. Is it meant to be a play on words? 

Get it?

No one says “high speedy”, because it doesn’t mean anything. No one talks about their "casual life". And no one writes “maybe I will do it my way”, least of all leather-clad desert trekking bikers. But once you leave a native English-speaking market, this stuff becomes pure gold. English is a very different beast here – it’s fizzy and it's glamorous, and faintly intoxicating. And even when it’s wrong, it’s oh so right.