http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/shirts-boys-abercrombie-says-its-done-sexualized-marketing-164300

"Adweek" magazine ran a story today about how Abercrombie and Fitch is changing its marketing strategy and is not going to feature shirtless male models to sell its products and Hollister's products. According to the article, Abercrombie's sales have gone down so the company is going to focus more on product and less on the buff guys they relied on in ads and in the stores to sell those products. Hollister will also quit using shirtless lifeguards at its events.

This was interesting to me to read because I always wonder how companies like this make decisions about how they are going to sell their products. At some point, probably by asking questions of young people, they must have decided that it would help them sell their clothes if they emphasized sexuality. They went the opposite direction of a lot of advertising for young people, though, and focused on shirtless men instead of sexy women. I'm sure it did help their sales right at first because people were curious and it was kind of an oddity. But finally, I think, people thought it was in bad taste and it was just kind of annoying to see these young men without shirts at the front of an Abercrombie store.

It's funny to me how much time and energy and money goes into deciding how a company is going to sell its products. In this case, Abercrombie is saying that they are now going to focus on "product and customer experience." They say this like this is unusual and like it's something new and revolutionary to sell a product by focusing on the product! Maybe if all companies concentrated on just making a better product for their customers, they would do better because people would trust them more and not just think that they're going for something wild like shirtless models to get our attention.

Politics and the English Language

Question 9: How would you describe the tone of Orwell's essay? Can you sum it up in one word, or does the essay range from one tone to another? Cite specific passages to support your response.


The primary tone of Orwell's essay is serious, although his examples tend to be entertaining. More than anything, I see it as a warning to people of the time that language can be misused and misunderstood. He centers on political writing because, at the time, this is what concerned people. His point was that if people don't pay attention to the misuse of language, they might agree to things or believe things that aren't right. Like when he talks about politicians, and the people who write their speeches, he says that they repeat the same phrases to try to convince people of things, but they lose their meaning.

"When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases--bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder--one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy." It's like people going through the motions to get the people to believe what politicians want them to believe.

If they use euphemisms, or simple pleasant words and phrases in place of unpleasant words, it's kind of the same thing. If we're not careful as readers and listeners of these words, we won't pay close enough attention to what is really being said. He talks about defending political actions by describing them in pleasant euphemisms so people will more easily accept them. "Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants drive out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification." It's easier to get people to accept the government doing this to poor people in a village if it is called pacification.

Orwell is right. We need to seriously pay attention to language, especially the language of people who are in the government. If we don't, they can just keep using "pleasant" words and phrases to describe their otherwise bad actions and we will just accept it.