The Museum of Brands 品牌博物馆

Sun Chen: 还有我，孙晨。我们在这个节目当中，会给你介绍很多伦敦很有意思的地方。我们今天要说的主题，就是品牌。

Helen: Brands.

Sun Chen: 还有广告。

Helen: Advertising.

Sun Chen: 我们今天先远离伦敦繁忙的商业区，我们要去的这家博物馆叫做品牌，包装和广告博物馆。

Helen: The museum's director, Robert Opie, has been collecting brands and packaging for the last 30 years so he was happy to tell us how it all began. As you listen, try to catch the three different types of products that Robert mentions. What does Robert mean by 'in bulk'?

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Well if you go back to say the middle of the 19th century, virtually all the products that were being produced at that time were sent to the grocer in bulk. And he would make up and blend his own specific teas or he would dole out the dried fruits or the sugar or whatever it was. And it would be prepared in front of you and you could see what the product was.

Helen: Up until around 1850, the middle of the 19th century, the products that grocers sold were sent to them 'in bulk'. Did you work out what that means?

Sun Chen: Yes, 我们听到了 Robert 说到了三种东西，一个是茶 tea, 还有干果 dried fruit 和糖 sugar. 这些东西通常都是大量运送的，经常是装在大袋子里面。所以单词 bulk 的意思，就是大量的。

Helen: And at that time, the product would be prepared in front of you. So shoppers could see what they were getting when they paid for a pound in weight of tea, for example.

Sun Chen: 这个听起来很好啊，为什么商店现在不这么做了呢？现在所有的东西都已经是包装好的 packaging, 而且事先也都是处理过的。

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Come the packaging revolution, that all disappeared and why was that? Well, people were getting a bit wary about what the grocer was putting into his tea and so on. He was making up weights of that pound that you ordered with little bits of spurious, hmm, perhaps the sawdust from the floor even!

Helen: Yuck! Sawdust? That's certainly "spurious"; shavings of wood instead of pure tea?

Sun Chen: That's cheating! 没想到小卖部 grocer 为了增加分量，居然把地上的木屑，也加到糖和茶里面，来增加分量。怪不得人们现在都觉得小卖部没信誉了呢!

Helen: It was the dishonest grocer who brought on the packaging revolution. Of course, the people who made the products, the manufacturers.

Sun Chen: 制造商。

Helen: ...soon realised that packaging could mean new publicity opportunities.

Sun Chen: 新的宣传好机会。

Helen: As Robert puts it, "a whole new publicity angle". And customers got a few extras too!

Sun Chen: 我们来听听下面的两个例子。罗伯特跟我们说的这个肥皂的包装，出现在十九世纪八十年代。

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Once the manufacturer had control over his product, he could put recipes on, he could say this is the same quality as the time before. So the whole thing took on a whole new meaning and a whole new publicity angle.

I'm looking here at a Sunlight Soap packet, a brand that went right around the world. And the great way that they attracted customers to this was they offered a £1,000 reward if you could find anything wrong with the product. I mean that was a huge enticement.

Helen: Ok, free recipes are quite useful but the soap product wins hands down for me!

Sun Chen: Sunlight 当时的这种肥皂包装，非常受消费者的喜爱。

Helen: No wonder it was so enticing, tempting people worldwide.

Sun Chen: 这上面说，你要是发现产品有问题的话，你能得到一千英镑的奖励。

Helen: After all, a thousand pounds in the 1880s would have been a huge amount of money.

Sun Chen: 现在，一千英镑也不少啊！

Helen: Of course, branding and packaging is still about selling products but it's also about another sales message that keeps on changing.

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If you buy my brand, you become a hip kinda, cool kinda person. That's the kind of person you want to be. And of course, that'll continually change as our perception and our ideals change, as society changes.

Sun Chen: 这正是销售广告的目的。你要是买我们这个牌子，你就会变成最时尚的人。

Helen: And our perception of what's hip and what's cool will change as society changes.

Sun Chen: 随着社会和人们认知的变迁，广告也在随时改变，来适应人们的口味。

Helen: That's it for today's On the Town from BBC Learning English.

Sun Chen: 我们下次节目再见。

Helen: Bye bye.