ENGLISH

CROSS CULTURAL ADVERTISING
(November 22nd 2010)

ISCOM, TC 11, Justin Pepper Work by Céline PUIGSEGUR

I. CROSS CULTURAL ADVERTISING

1) What is cross cultural advertising?
Cross cultural advertising has appeared with trends of the last decades in economic and commercial activities: with the tendency to economic integration, the issue in international marketing and advertising is to understand if consumers will be more and more alike from a country to another or if their differences will stay stable. In other words, the interest is to know if we should globalize marketing and advertising or adapt them to the culture of each country.

And studies have shown that in developed countries, consumers were more and more alike. Economic growth seems to determine a pattern of evolution for consumers. They would have common tastes in media, advertising consume and consuming habits. But global campaigns would be successful only in a context of cultural and behavioural convergence between the countries where they are launched. And even in this case, success isn’t totally guarantied, because advertising is strongly culture-bound and each country has its cultural specificities in language, values, lifestyle, etc.

It is important to understand how to make an international marketing and global advertising campaign because it is the key for a future growth for a company.

However, international marketing target different countries and it is possible to answer similar needs in different countries. It is possible to convince people that a product or a service is meant for them and will bring them some benefit, whatever their lifestyles or status are. But we won’t communicate exactly the same way for each country because every culture has its specificities and every culture has different values and perceptions. To make a cross cultural campaign successful, we must highlight areas of cross cultural differences in advertising by incorporating characteristics