'Impossible is Nothing'? (new adidas slogan)

[Jamie (K)]

Amy, I completely disagree with you about how native English speakers would process that slogan. The arguments you give in favor of the "nothing is impossible" meaning are really arguments FOR understanding it as "the impossible is easy". Native speakers who are halfway alert would quickly understand it as a play on words that is meant to say that people who easily do the impossible choose Adidas.

Of course the company doesn't want to imply that that top athletes achieved their sports successes easily. They are saying that what they achieved is almost impossible, or IS impossible. The message is that Adidas are the shoes chosen by athletes for who effortlessly achieve the impossible, and that if the consumer wears them, he is joining that elite group. The idea is not to downgrade the achievements of the athletes, but to make the consumer feel that by wearing Adidas he is upgrading himself. It's offering the consumer greatness by association, which is a very common advertising strategy.

The fact that Adidas uses the words as a worldwide slogan means nothing. Companies frequently use the same slogan or advertisement worldwide without any regard as to whether people outside the original country will understand it the way it's intended. Sometimes the results are catastrophic:

1. An ad agency where I worked had to make up a Spanish slogan for one insurance company, because there was trouble in the Southwest with their English one, which was "Farmers gets you back where you belong." It was a very effective slogan with the Anglos, but many Hispanic consumers in the Southwest understood it as meaning the company would send them back to Mexico.

2. Some worldwide companies based in Germany make one advertisement for the whole world, not seeming to know what effect the ad has in North America. Those Mentos ads in the 1990s that were supposed to look cool and happy in Europe looked bizarre and spooky to Americans, partly because of people's movements and facial expressions. The announcer who said, "Mentos -- The Freshmaker!" sounded American to Europeans, but to Americans he sounded like a German straining hard to imitate an American accent. This made the ads even more mysterious to Americans.

3. More recently, Allianz had an advertisement with a rich race driver and his small daughter. It was supposed to give a high-class but "warm" image to the company, but the little girl was dressed just like the girl in the Addams Family, and the father had stiff German posture and mannerisms that made him look to Americans like a marionette. Again, the overall effect of the ad was spooky.

4. My American bank has been bought by the Royal Bank of Scotland. The advertisements are made by the British. (I know, because they were in my local branch shooting a commercial.) It seems the ads are usually made IN Britain. Although the actors are reasonably good at American accents, they have strange physical movements, strange facial expressions, strange haircuts, and even the way their clothes hang doesn't look right to people here. The effect on the American viewer is one of, "There's something wrong, but I don't know what," which is not the image a company should want to convey to consumers. If the actors looked the same but spoke with British accents instead, Americans wouldn't notice anything wrong.

Torsten, PR stands for "public relations". The abbreviation RP is known by English profs at American universities, but we don't talk about it much, because it's not the target pronunciation.

It's funny that Germans misinterpreted that Douglas slogan, because I have a German student at one company who always asks me, "Can you find out?" when he wants to ask me, "Can you find your way out?"

[Torsten]

[Yankee]

[Torsten]

Hi Amy,

I've just realized that RP is different from PR -- thanks for pointing that out. Yes, I think in Germany many people also use the abbreviation PR (usually pronounced the German way) to refer to Public Relations.
As for PageRank, I agree you need the appropriate context to understand what is meant and usually it the term is used a word rather than the abbreviation PR.
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[Yankee]

[Jamie (K)]

If you want a lot of fun examples of Denglish (not to be confused with Germlish), take a look at the book Modern Talking auf deutsch by Walter Kr?mer. It has some interesting German words that are supposed to be English, such as "goal-getter".

[Yankee]

[Jamie (K)]

[Torsten]

[Jamie (K)]

[Conchita]

[Torsten]

Hmm, don't know. I have a friend from Bangor, Northern Ireland who pronounces the word 'mobile' the American way.
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[Jamie (K)]

[Ralf]

Thank you Torsten for passing on this thread to me. What can I say? The few Canadians I know sound quite Northern American to me. They have always been quite eager to stress that, apart from putting an affermative "aye" after each regular sentence, their pronounciation of the word "about" is different from the way that the yanks pronounce it and sounds more like "a boot", which is true...

However, as far as similarities between Irish and Northern American people are concerned, it is probably fair to say that both varieties of the English language are 'rhotic' (the "r"s are pronounced) and people tap the "t"s (so that they sound more like "d"s, e.g. in letter). That distinguishes them from most British accents (exception Cornwall and Eastern Scotland). But I still think that Irish accents are more similar to British accents.

As for the word "mobile", even in Ireland there are many ways to say it. In Dublin, where I'm from, you'd pronounce it "moubojl". In Northern Ireland it'd sound a bit more Scottish like "moubejl" and in the rest of the country probably more like "mo:bajl".
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[prezbucky]

I think that whoever came up with this slogan did so in Yodamode.

"Help you I can."

"Impossible is nothing."

well wait... actually Yoda would likely have said, "Impossible nothing is" or "Nothing impossible is".
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