Some Slogans Suck

A recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle leads with topical Super Bowl commercials, only to trot out the same old apocryphal tales of ad campaigns that got lost in translation. This one really sucks.

American companies aren't the only ones that have fumbled their ad campaigns on foreign soil. Sometimes the embarrassment is imported to our very own shores. Case in point: Electrolux, the Scandinavian electronics company. Electrolux can make one heck of a refrigerator (Frigidare) and if you need a vacuum cleaner that'll suck the chrome off a trailer hitch, they're your guys. But the company ran into a little trouble trying to persuade the American consumer of that in the early 1970s. When the company took its catchy rhyming phrase "nothing sucks like an Electrolux" and brought it to America from English-speaking markets overseas, they failed to take into consideration the fact that "sucks" had become a derogatory word in the States. The serious language barrier persuaded the firm to turn to a U.S.-based PR firm for future ad campaigns.

But does the slogan really suck? Corporate names and taglines don't exist in a vacuum. I'd like to think that smart advertisers might appreciate the theory of negativity at work in the memorable marketing slogan, "Nothing sucks like an Electrolux."

Today, all the best vacuums, Fantom, Dyson, Oreck, really suck. But modern vacuum cleaner wars will not be won by suckers. The future belongs to robots named Roomba or Zoomba or something, engaged in effortless hoovering about the house. By the way, isn't anyone just a bit concerned that this Roomba vacuum cleaner is made by a company called iRobot?

Electrolux has its own robotic vacuum cleaner, the Trilobite:

The trilobite was a type of arthropod that vacuumed the ocean beds for small animals and particles about 250-560 million years ago. Its back was hard, and the trilobite is perhaps the best known of the fossils seen in walls, steps and flooring made of stone. This animal has lent its name and its shape to the new Trilobite vacuum cleaner.

The Electrolux Group is now an umbrella brand, inclusive of other great brand names like Frigidaire and Eureka, but it still doesn't make an umbrella.

It's got to be one of the most ironic twists of naming and branding that in England people don't vacuum at all—they hoover, after the American vacuum cleaner manufacturer, Hoover.

One of their most noteworthy innovations was the beater bar, introduced in 1926, which was the basis for one of the most memorable advertising slogans in history: "It beats as it sweeps as it cleans." Here's how it works: As a metal bar gently taps the carpet to loosen deeply embedded dirt, a bristle brush rapidly sweeps the carpet aided by strong suction.

And doesn't that just beat all.