profit and loss
Seven years ago, a London-based advertising executive had an idea. He noticed that a clients’ employees habitually abbreviated their company name in such a way as to make it look like a rude word. An advertising campaign was born.
French Connection United Kingdom’s infamous acronym has proved astonishingly profitable, helping turn a £5 million loss (in 1992) into a £39 million profit in 2003. Only recently has a decline in market share prompted the announcement that the slogan is doomed.
The adverts received much criticism. The American Family Association condemned the campaign. One British judge called it ‘tasteless and obnoxious’ and another ejected a juror for wearing a branded T-shirt in court. The UK Advertising Standards Authority (finally) insisted the company submit its posters before publication. All to little effect: more complaints meant more column inches meant more publicity meant more sales.
It is easy to lambast French Connection for the campaign: it is indeed tasteless and obnoxious, and those responsible for it, amoral and self-serving. It is slightly harder to understand why so many people want to wear a logo whose only merit is that it looks a bit like a swear word: one would have hoped that such puerile, sniggering, nearly-got-caught naughtiness faded with adolescence.
Yet it is far harder to explain – in a way that people might understand and not dismiss as reactionary hyperbole – why French Connection’s profit is our loss.
The campaign succeeds not because it is shocking (such would-be expletives traumatise few) but because it is thoroughly conventional. It encourages the kind of aggressive individualism whereby people happily disregard public sensibilities in pursuit of self-expression. Only through unfettered self-expression, we believe, will we find self-fulfilment.
Yet, as Christianity insists, we are persons, not isolated individuals, and personhood is shaped by our relationships with one another, with creation and, supremely, with God. Disdaining the ‘other’ by sporting crass messages not only insults them but also, in some small, all-but-imperceptible way, damages ourselves.
Legislating against such clothing is an absurdity. This is, as Max Hastings recently wrote in the Guardian, a social rather than a political problem. If it has a solution, it lies not in a ban on clothing but in helping people understand that it is through respect for others, even self-sacrifice for them, that we truly express ourselves.
Nick Spencer
additional resources
Max Hastings' article in the Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk)
The Advertising Standards Authority (www.asa.org.uk)
BBC article on charity advert complaints (www.bbc.co.uk)
A report from WardHadaway solicitors about the ASA's disagreement with French Connection over its latest website, www.fcuk.com... 'French Connection argued that its FCUK trademark was distinctive and that consumers were familiar with the well-known brand in a number of commercial contexts. As a consequence consumers would not confuse FCUK with an offensive expletive (i.e. an obscene anagram of the trade mark).'
'Judge's fury at four-letter ads' (www.bbc.co.uk)
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