Ever want to buy a body bag?
Haven't you always wanted to win a body bag?
(From a friend)
I'm sure you are familiar with this situation: you're out shopping and return with things you didn't even have on your list in the first place. That's what happened to us last year during one of our Saturday morning shopping excursions. Even before entering through the turnstiles we noticed one of those raffle stands that frequently clog the entrances to supermarkets: a tall cardboard structure in the easily recognisable colours of a well-known beverage manufacturer. Filling in a reply card from the stack, and dropping it through a slit into the box (and with a bit of luck) can win you something you probably always wanted to have, but never bothered to buy. In passing I caught a glance of the coveted prizes advertised in big letters on the cardboard box. First I'm surprised, then I can barely keep myself from laughing out loud. It's ... body bags!
Who in the world would raffle off a prize like this? A German beverage producer, as mentioned above, and not a small one at that! This producer specialises in a particular type of alcoholic beverage and is now the market leader selling more in volume of this type of beverage than all other German competitors combined. And why would they think raffling off body bags would improve their profit intake?? Well, the fact of the matter is, they don't.
Although it's a German company and a German ad targeted at the German market, they chose to use an expression most people would likely recognise. After all, "body" is all too familiar, as in "The Body Shop", the "Body" (as appropriated by German to mean "bodysuit"), and of course "Bodybuilding". "Bag" is another word of many that has seeped its way into a more modern, "cooler" German. The item pictured in the add is slung jauntily over the shoulders across the body. "Body" + "bag". What could be more logical than "body bag"?
What is interesting is that "body bag" is practically the only English word used in this ad, despite the existence of a perfectly appropriate German word. In fact, the item is a rather slight variation of the generic backpack. However, the company had obviously decided that the perfectly appropriate German word for "backpack" -- "Rucksack" -- was probably not hip enough to attract the younger target group.
In doing so this beverage producer fell into a trap that catches surprisingly many companies which attempt to use or create a "fashionable" foreign-language word to market their products, often overlooking the possibility of its original usage or meaning. To a German marketing or PR manager, "body bag" might have sounded like an obvious choice, perhaps not realising that English can at times be as prosaically literal as German. However, in English a "body bag" can be only one thing, a body bag!
With this unexpected blunder, this beverage producer joins a considerable list of reputable companies that have forgotten that international English, even in its most modern usage, is more than just a stock pile of hip-sounding words and images associated with them. Interestingly enough, this list contains a number of names for beverages which couldn't possibly have been marketed in many other countries. In Japan a soft drink is sold under the name "Piss", while Poland has seen the introduction of a popular drink called "Fart".
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Always do right, it will gratify some and astonish the rest - Twain
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