The Handbook of World Englishes, 2nd Edition

34World 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 ...