Упражнения уровня TOEFL по английскому языку. № 26.

Are brands so powerful today that you could launch one without a product and still make a splash in the market? To find out, the Guardian newspaper created a fictional brand with nothing to offer but the power of its own advertising campaign, and 1,562 people responded.

'Joy' is a brand without a product. People used to make money by selling things; today, we make money by selling an emotional attachment to a brand - and power accrues to those who best know how to make a logo, or a product name, or the music for a TV ad that catches the imagination of the public.

That's the theory, anyway. To test it, the Guardian concocted an experiment: to design and launch a brand that was nothing but a brand - not a product or a service, just pure brand - and find out whether that alone could bring consumers flocking to phone lines and websites to register their interest. Our branded culture has created a vast array of specialists - branding consultants, brand-naming experts, brand psychologists - and over several weeks a team of Guardian journalists and marketing staff worked with a selection of them to create a fictional brand launch from first concept to national advertising campaign. Joy was the result.

Vast advertisements for Joy begin to appear in the Guardian newspaper, daily, over six days. To gauge response, the ads invited respondents to call a free telephone number, so space at a commercial telephone bank was hired to take calls. A web address was advertised, too. Within the first 24 hours, hundreds of people phoned or visited the website.

By the time Joy ended its brief foray into the public consciousness, 1,562 people had visited the website or called the telephone line. Joy had stirred some kind of emotion, some kind of interest, in thousands of people.

a) Match the words from the text on the left with their meanings on the right.

Words in text Meaning
(1) c concocted a) moving in large numbers
(2) a flocking b) excursion
(3) d gauge c) devised
(4) b foray d) evaluate

b) Choose the best answer.

(1) Which of the following would be the most appropriate title for the article?
a) How to Get Some 'Joy' in your Life. /
b) The Power of Brands. /
c) The Guardian Newspaper Goes Commercial. /

(2) The writer believes that the 'Joy' experiment …
a) has cost the Guardian newspaper a lot of money. /
b) has proved how easily influenced people can be. /
c) created a lot of interest amongst the public. /