True, except that they also have commercials that don’t feature Dyson but some chick with a British accent. But it’s OK since they’re a British company.
Normally I don’t have a problem with that but when you combine that with the fact that they’re also trying to tell you that they’re products are so much more intelligently designed and superior when, if I’m not mistaken, ratings don’t generally support that assertion, it becomes just a bit cloying.
Thanks. There really is no reason for a British company to be using a British spokesperson in an American ad. You don’t generally see CEO’s doing ads for their companies. So in my humble estimation, it’s just a thinly veiled justification for what’s actually going on.
Which is possibly true, but irrelevant as deltasigma was whining that a British man who owns a British company dared to speak with a British accent.
They do have a number of innovations that have been [del]stolen[/del] copied by their competitors. Like Shark, now with ads out about how they have all the same features as Dyson but are cheaper. But see, they are directly admitting they have to copy Dyson’s functionality.
Why not? Being British may be part of their identity, like Jaguar. In fact, Jaguar might make a better case for your argument, being luxury cars.
Maybe it is, or maybe it’s because James Dyson likes the personal touch. Maybe it’s because he started the business he didn’t have much money for advertising, so he did the ads himself, and now it’s kind of a tradition or theme. Maybe he’s got a huge raging ego and wants his face with his product.
Other CEOs who did ads for their products: Colonel Sanders (Kentucky Fried Chicken) and Dave Thomas (Wendy’s). George Zimmer of Men’s Wearhouse (though he’s since been fired from the company he founded). That’s who I can think of off the top of my head. Jack from Jack In The Box doesn’t count.
To me, it just feels like you are reading way to much into the situation, almost like you want to be insulted. A British guy does an ad to sell a product he invented and you think he’s trying to insult your intelligence by having a British accent. That’s nuts to me.
Maybe I was reading too much into it as long as it was only Dyson himself doing the ads, but I’ve already told you it wasn’t - unless of course you don’t believe me. If you want me to waste my time digging up proof, I will but you’re going to have to call me a liar first.
As for other CEO’s doing the same thing, of course they have. I never said otherwise. I simply said it’s not common and that it was in all likelihood simply a thinly veiled excuse, which I still firmly believe.
You know I would actually have more tolerance for a smarmy Jaguar ad along the same lines but that’s mainly because everybody knows that Ford has owned Jaguar since 1999 so that would actually be funny. But on a more serious note, someone like British Airways would be perfectly fine and they could be as smarmy as they liked.
<nitpick>Actually, as the link you provided explains, they’ve been owned by Tata, an Indian company since 2008. So, the appropriate accent would sound fairly English to American ears.</nitpick>
Hilarious! When my group makes a recommendation to my company’s Board of Directors, we sometimes bring an expert consultant along to present the materials and to help answer any difficult questions. Over the years, we learned that getting the Board to approve our recommendation is much easier if the consultant has a British accent. So now we specifically ask for the British guy to come in and present, even if there is no difference in the materials being presented. We recently learned that this is not uncommon.
I should probably say that I’m actually something of a rabid anglophile. I just didn’t like the implications I believed were present in Dyson’s ad. I’m willing to admit that maybe I’m being unfairly critical, but if you can’t be unfairly critical on an internet forum, what’s really left in life? Sex, drugs and rock and roll? How passe.
…and if it’s a woman with a British Accent, she can even sell you toilet products, like wet wipes or toilet deodorizer sprays, and you won’t think it’s in poor taste.
And for some reason, lizards selling insurance have a vaguely Australian/New Zealand accent. But at least they’re not selling toilet products.
This isn’t so creepy as the girl in the car with Maxwell who drops not too subtle hints that she wants to do the nasty with a pig. Seriously, Geico, what are you thinking?
No, I’m aware there are Dyson ads with a British woman doing the voiceover. The thing is, branding can be for a lot of reasons and not just because many Americans give British accents unearned credibility. I stand by the fact that the company is a British company, there is nothing abnormal about having a British spokesperson, even in American ads.
Every Jaguar ad I’ve seen has a British spokesperson saying “Jag-yu-ar”, as opposed to “Jag-war”, which is the typical American pronunciation.
I’ve met a lot of Indian people, mainly well-educated, who have lovely British accents. But that makes perfect sense being a relatively recent former colony. And just now I looked up a random ad on youtube for Air India and they don’t have what we Americans would consider a typical Indian accent but something that is, to my ear, more British. But that’s fine, because it’s not the accent per se that I’m objecting to if you’ve understood the point I’ve been trying to make - edit: which I think you do.
As an aside, I worked with a guy who had EXACTLY the Geico gecko’s accent - it was totally distracting to talk to him! I think he was from somewhere in the UK.
If I remember correctly, there was a running gag in the one of the GEICO commercials where people were asking the gecko where he was from.
The first British accents I ever heard were The Beatles and James Bond, and I have always associated the accent with ‘coolness’. I know it is facile to make such a blanket statement, but it is, nevertheless, a commonly held prejudice held by many of my cohort. In my case, my first serious relationship was with a girl from Israel who spoke English with a lovely British accent, and I suppose that hit a heart-note with me.
So, in my opinion, the British Invasion of the 60’s still influences North American attitudes positively even now. I would also be remiss to fail to point out the long-lived influence of Doctor Who and Monty Python upon North American culture. It is a peculiar thing, in my mind, the relationship between the UK and the USA that isn’t quite the same between any other pair of nations. I suppose that is a meaningless thing to say because all pairs of unique members of a set will all have a unique interrelationship. But, even though the USA is not a part of the Commonwealth, the aisles of supermarkets throughout this country are filled with magazines the front cover subjects are Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge and their son, Prince George of Cambridge.
I wouldn’t in the slightest be surprised to find that doctoral theses have been written about the subject in the discipline of Economics.
