A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Emotional Appeals in Advertising

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

A considerable amount of cross-cultural studies have been conducted in the advertising field. The dimensions mainly used in cross-cultural comparison are individualism versus collectivism and masculinity versus femininity. However, the dimension of masculinity-femininity is sometimes confounded with individualism-collectivism, because they have a common denominator in terms of relationships, even though Hofstede (2001) points out that these two dimensions are independent and orthogonal. Furthermore, while previous research has suggested cultural differences influence appropriate message appeals and depictions of gender, such research has seldom examined the effect of emotional appeals across cultures. In sum, the purpose of this research is to examine culture differences in emotional advertising considering two independent cultural dimensions jointly(individualismversus collectivismandmasculinity versus femininity). A content analysis of 210 emotional television advertisements in eight different countries was employed. The results of the content analysis demonstrate that individual emotion was used more compared to collectivistic emotion in individualistic cultures, while collectivistic emotion wasmore used compared to individualist emotion in collectivistic cultures. Meanwhile, masculine emotionwasmore used compared to feminine emotion in masculine cultures. More interestingly, results show that the relative frequency of emotional appeals differed in both masculine and feminine cultures in similar individualistic cultures. This patternwas also true in collectivistic cultures even, but it was not statistically significant. Similarly, individual and collectivistic emotionswere used differently in bothmasculine and feminine cultures. These findings, when taken together, suggest that not all individualistic(collectivistic) cultures appeal similar emotions; it also means not all masculine(feminine) cultures appeal similar emotions, suggesting two cultural dimensions of individualism-collectivism and masculinity versus femininity should be considered jointly.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Abstract
• Ⅰ. Introduction
• Ⅱ. Theoretical Background
• Ⅲ. Empirical study
• Ⅳ. Conclusion
• References