Misuse Of Language In Advertising Essay

Often times customers have their own ideas of what a word can mean or even a certain emotion or feeling placed with it, and usuallty that idea or feeling does not exacly relate to the actual meaning. Company’s use these ambiguous words in hope that the consumers will have a positive conotation for the word so that the they will want to buy their product. Misuse of language in advertising also shows on the buisness side where the companies may use a word just to draw in unsuspecting customers with false claimsa such as promise of a “heathier” or “Natural” product. A number of critics have suggested that companies have begun to rely more on consumers to have positive conotations about certain words used in advertisment and to not question what …show more content…
When I asked friends and family what they thought of when they hear a product is “organic” or “natural” the general concensue is they assume the product to be in some way healthy. This is what companies hope consumer will think when looking for a “natural” product. The true definition for natural is “anything existing in or caused by nature”, no where does it claim the health benifits of a product(). For instanst Honest tea claims their drink to be organic and made of real organic cane sugar and while that may be true it’s still doesn’t mean that the drink is healthy especially to drink in large quantities. Critic Kim Severson suggests that,”The sugar may be from cane jucie and tapioca syrup, but it’s sugar all the same”(437). In other words while the product may have “natural” ingredients it still isn’t technically healthy or good for you. Though there are cases where the company may just use words such as natural with an empty meaning just to go with the trend. For example, PepsiCo sold a version of their drink “Sierra Mist” called “Sierra Mist Natural” in hopes of attracting health conscious consumers who may enjoy their drinks. The company claimed to have replaced the high frutosce corn syrup with “real sugar”, though they later admitted that the “real sugar” came from geneticly motified sugar beets. So not only was the drink not …show more content…
When consumers go looking for medicence to get rid of whatever cold or ailment they may have, they may be lured in by words like “relieves” in hopes that it will soothe their ailments. Usually if the product does its job and relieves their sysmtoms they may believe that if they continue using the product that the cause of the symtoms will go away, but that’s not the case. Lutz states that,”Nowhere does this ad claim it will cure anything. In fact, the ad doesn’t even claim to do anything at all”(416). In other words, while consumers may believe that the product is or should be curing them of their ailment no where does it claim its ability to do so. For example products such as Colagates Sensitive Pro-Relief toothpaste states that their product will relieve the pain for sensitive teeth and gums. Even though it does relieve teeth pain it doesn’t cure the underlying cause of the pain such as gingavitus which is a form of gum dieases. It may appear to disappear with time but that’s only because the person may have started taking better care of their teeth and gums. Therefore, the issue which was causing the pain cleared up because of a possible change in the persons habit and not because of the product they used.
It wasn’t until I truly understood the meaning of the advertisements that I was able to understood