Enticing the Bilingual Consumer: Interject an English Word into a Spanish Ad

Newswise — Fully 20% of American consumers consider themselves bilingual, but until recently advertisers have had little idea of how best to reach this growing sector of the U.S. population.

A recent study of “code-switching” by David Luna and Laura Peracchio, professors of marketing at Baruch College and the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, gives some tantalizing hints. “Code-switching” is the academic term for changing horses in mid-sentence—or, in this instance, interjecting an English word into a Spanish sentence. Because English in seen as the “dominant” language, placing an English word into a Spanish ad is more persuasive than the reverse--placing a Spanish word into an ad written primarily in English.

Why should this be so? Linguists have long understood that language signals social identity. Explaining that “code-switching activates language-specific associations,” the authors show that minority languages generally have less prestige than majority languages. Thus advertisers who switched from a majority to a minority language (typically English to Spanish)

“elicited a significantly higher proportion of negative thoughts” and lower product evaluations than advertisers who made the switch in reverse.

But there’s a lot more room for research here because, the authors contend, the results are quite different if attitudes toward the minority language are positive.

“Advertising to Bilingual Consumers: The Impact of Code-Switching on Persuasion” is being published in The Journal of Consumer Research, the leading journal of in its field, in the March 2005 issue.