ABSTRACT
Advertising has been defined in Chapter 1 by Thorson and Rodgers as a “paid communication from an identified sponsor for using mass media to persuade an audience.” And while some controversy exists over the application of this definition to advertising in the twenty-first century with the use of “mass” media, culturally speaking the controversy continues with the notion that the goal of advertising is to persuade. Several scholars of culture and international advertising have argued that the goal of advertising is more about building relationships and trust with consumers than it is about persuading (de Mooij, 2010; de Mooij & Hofstede, 2010). And culture plays a role in this argument. Culture is a complex and multidimensional construct (Cleveland & Laroche, 2007). Part of the complexity is that the same term is used quite differently across disciplines such as biology and anthropology as well as art and advertising (de Mooij, 2010). However, as Gudykunst (1998) suggests, it is important to select a working definition to guide analysis and discussion. In this chapter, culture is conceptualized following Hofstede (1997) as “the collective mental programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another” (p. 5). It is a system of shared meanings (Geertz, 1973). Although Hofstede (1980) used this definition in his research
examining work environments in different countries, we believe the definition is flexible enough to also include subcultures within a country. Returning to Thorson and Rodgers’ “Components of the Advertising Process Circle” framework represented in Figure 1.1, and borrowing from McGuire’s (1969) communication process model, we can more clearly see the critical role of culture in communication and especially its role in creating effective advertising messages. According to de Mooij (2010), values are at the core of culture and are the standards that drive people’s beliefs, attitudes, and behavior. They can also greatly influence communication style preferences. Culture influences both the context within which advertising and communication occurs, and has an impact on individual level processing. We can see the dual influence of culture by examining McGuire’s (1969) model of persuasive communication in advertising. McGuire’s model involves (1) the sender as the advertiser and source of the message followed by (2) the message itself and the methods used to convey the message which are then (3) channeled through a medium such as TV or radio to be (4) received by the consumer, and all of this takes place within at least one if not two cultural environments. The largest area for miscommunication occurs between the advertiser wanting to encode a certain association and meaning with the brand in the advertising message, and the consumer who may decode the meaning differently. De Mooij (2010) and Cateora and Graham (2007) have both suggested that the encoding and decoding process become even more troublesome and complex when the advertiser is from one culture and the target audience of the message is from another culture. As an example, “a golf ball manufacturing company packaged golf balls in packs of four for convenient purchase in Japan. Unfortunately, pronunciation of the word ‘four’ in Japanese sounds like the word ‘death’ and items packaged in fours are unpopular” (Kwintessential.com, 2010). Problems such as this stem from the sender and the receiver coming from different worldviews that are the lenses through which each interprets the world. According to Gudykunst (1998), dimensions of cultural variability are necessary to help explain differences between cultures. But as mentioned previously, culture exists at a variety of levels such as global, national, and within nation (Leung, Bhagat, Buchan, Erez, & Gibson, 2005). Traditionally in international advertising research, culture has been viewed from a national level where countries have been grouped using a number of characteristics and the people within each country possess these traits more so than people from other countries (Gao, 2009; Han & Shavitt, 1994; La Ferle, Edwards, & Mizuno, 2002). This view has been criticized by some researchers recently for being quite rigid and perceiving culture as fixed and geographically based (Cleveland & Laroche, 2007; Craig & Douglas, 2006; Zhang, 2010).
