Persuasively speaking
CALL ME a nerd, call me an anorak, call me a car geek. I don’t mind – they’re all true – and I promise not to bore you in the pub (unless, of course, we’re cut from the same cloth, in which case bring your Observers’ Book of Cars).
But as a result of my lifelong obsession with both cars and language, I have an uncanny ability to remember automotive advertising slogans from when I was less than five years old. In reception class, I really did believe that if you had an Austin Maestro (my dad was still on the Allegro…) then driving was, indeed, believing. I knew that my mother wouldn’t like an MGB, though through the naivety of youth I could never understand why (she loved a sports car), and I was acutely aware that with a Mini Clubman you didn’t need a big one to be happy. But it was the Jaguar adverts that always really stood out.
I’ve loved a Jag since I was about three feet tall, when our next-door neighbour bought one as a retirement gift to himself and I used to stand in our front garden and stare at it in awe. He’d foregone the appeal of the Ultimate Driving Machine and the one that was Engineered Like No Other Car in the World, opting instead for the Pursuit of Perfection, taking his chance to own The Best Jaguar Ever Built. Four years later, that car – aSeries III XJ6 for those that can’t photographically recollect 1980s car ads – was replaced with a car that was Different in Every Detail, but Every Inch a Jaguar, in the form of an XJ40. His car was a Sovereign, which Jaguar very cleverly claimed was worth any number of Deutsch Marques, and was so good that ‘The moment he got in, he knew he’d arrived’. Lovely stuff. Vorsprung Durch Technik or not, car manufacturers relied on print and billboard ads more back then than they do now and they all just got progressively cleverer.
I’VE LOVED A JAG SINCE I WAS ABOUT THREE FEET TALL
The advertising industry was in its heyday, even with lampooning films such as Dudley Moore’s Crazy People, which made ad agencies look vaguely ridiculous. That said, “They’re Boxy but They’re Good” became such a strong slogan for Volvo (by complete accident) that the Swedish manufacturer ran a series of its own ad campaigns in cinemas when the movie came out, even if it was a parody.
This golden age of advertising lasted throughout the 1990s and
