Culture, product category and advertising situation : a comparative study of advertising appeals in web automobile advertisements between the People's Republic of China and the United States of America

Abstract

The study of cross-cultural advertising appeals has been a prevalent topic in recent communication research. Nevertheless, an overview of the studies reveals that a study taking culture, product category, and especially advertising situation as factors in influencing the cross-cultural uses of advertising appeals on the Internet is largely absent. Thus, this study attempts to explore the relationship among culture, product category, advertising situation and the use of advertising appeals in the context of web advertising. To investigate the relationship, the contents of 460 web automobile banner and jump page advertisements from the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the United States of America (USA) are analyzed in terms of their uses of utilitarian and symbolic appeals. The results of this study indicate that utilitarian appeals are dominant in both the advertisements from PRC and USA. However, more symbolic appeals (particularly product symbol and personalization appeals) are found in the advertisements from PRC while more utilitarian appeals are identified in the advertisements of USA. Besides, the significant cross-cultural differences in the use of value appeals are mainly located in the jump page advertisements. Finally, results of the study and implications for advertising research based on the effects of culture (consumer culture with different developmental stages), product category (the level of product involvement, product nature and product type) and advertising situation (low-involving versus high-involving advertising situations) on the use of advertising appeals are discussed.