To Car, Perchance to Drive

More evidence that branding weirds language:

Hoping to cash in on the retro-trendiness of BMW's Mini Cooper and other successful revivals, Fiat is celebrating the 50th anniversary of its tiny Cinquecento, or Fiat 500, with a redesign and a relaunch.

The tagline for the ad campaign?

You Are. We Car.

I read that and thought, "No, no! You car. Me Nancy!"

Or, as Google gently chided me when I searched for the slogan: "Did you mean: 'you are we care'?"

No, of course not. Are doesn't rhyme with care, silly.

So--deep breath, and apologies to all the real linguists out there--let's try to parse this thing, shall we?

You are: Usually, the verb to be takes an object: You are a driver. You are German. You are very, very cool. Sometimes, though, "you are" stands alone as the answer to a question: Who's the smartest kid on the block? You are! Either way, it needs some sort of complement or referent.

Fiat could be answering an implicit question ("Who's our target market? You are!"), but it's more likely that the company is going Cartesian on us: You drive, therefore you are.

We car: This sounds like what a couple of Geico cavemen might mumble about a vehicle. Fiat, however, wants us to think of car as a verb, possibly one that means "to embody the automotive spirit." It's Datsun's old "We Are Driven" slogan stripped down to essential nouniness. Unfortunately, also stripped of clever double meaning.

 

Spiegel online sums up:

But no matter how attractive the new Fiat 500 is, "You are. We car." will always be a bad advertising slogan. To make matters worse, Fiat Germany head Manfred Kantner also offers his own translation -- rooted in existential philosophy, no less -- of the slogan. According to Kantner, it means: "You, as a person, are an individual with a wide variety of requirements, and we, as a company, are capable of satisfying all of these requirements."

I'm sure it's much more concise in the original German.

(Thanks to Paul Reinhart for the Spiegel link.)

Comments

[Erin]

Yeah, there is a third interpretation of the to-be verb in "you are", the "I think, therefore I am" meaning. This is the one I assumed was intended. Not that that makes it a better slogan.

[Jessica]

Boy, I could spend all day on the various Fiat sites learning all kinds of worthless info! For example, at least as far as I could tell, the utterly silly slogan appears only on the Spanish-language site. The "You" branding paradigm ("You, a writer," "You, yourself") appears, in English, on the English, French, and Italian sites (I didn't check the Japanese one, sorry), but on the German one it's all "Du," which I suppose strikes the desired carefree and familiar tone for this goofy little car but scares me as I will still not tutoyer, tutear or dutzen without proper invitation. I guess English is still mostly cool for advertising to Europeans. But truly my favorite nugget from this perusal is the news that the Fiat 500 won the "EuroCarBoy Award" for 2007. Doesn't "EuroCarBoy" sound like a euphemism for gigolo?

[Nancy Friedman]

Jessica: I want a EuroCarBoy of my own! But in fact the award is called EuroCarBody.

I found "You are. We car" on the business-services page of the English-language site: http://tinyurl.com/yukeh7

I do rather like "Dante, the cute Community mascot." So literary, the Italians!

And speaking of national stereotypes, here's another time-waster: Discover your inner European! Take the quiz here: http://www.blogthings.com/whosyourinnereuropeanquiz/

[Jessica]

Thanks for the corrections, Nancy. A girl can dream, can't she? In any event, thanks for helping me waste time.

[GoingLikeSixty]

Here I am again, hanging out with the smart people and chiming in!

There is a print PSA campaign running now (the one I saw had Jimmy Smits)
Send me a man
who cares!

Add a period after man?

There also was a PSA "back in the day" that was similar (maybe a ripoff?)

Send me a man
who reads!

Suggestion by woman reader: period after man / replace ! with ?

You are. We car.
You bad. We sad.