American and Chinese Thinking Styles: Attitude Effects on Holistic and Attribute Ads

Beichen Liang,Joseph Cherian

doi:10.15388/omee.2014.5.1.14242

Beichen Liang, Joseph Cherian

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.15388/omee.2014.5.1.14242

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Abstract

American (i.e., Western) thinking favors the analytic style, focusing on the focal object and internal attributes; Chinese (i.e., Eastern) thinking favors the holistic style, paying attention to the context and whole system. This research investigates whether such holistic and analytic thinking styles affect attitudes towards holistic ads which contain many types of information (availability, price, company, etc.) and attribute ads which contain only one type of information (product feature). The first study showed that (i) American consumers prefer attribute ads more than Chinese consumers do; (ii) both American and Chinese consumers prefer holistic ads more than attribute ads; and both prefer the holistic ads equally well. The second study showed that the impact of cultural differences in thinking styles on ad attitudes were not influenced by thinking speed – whether the thinking was fast and automatic or whether the thinking was slow and effortful. The stable and verifiable managerial implication is that ad content in the East and West, in the US and China must include more, diverse information.

Highlights

The type of ad information has a strong impact on consumer responses to ads, firms and brands (Abernethy & Franks, 1996)
Eastern thinking style is holistic in that attention is directed to elements and to relationships among elements; the Westerners’ thinking style is analytic thinking in that attention is directed to the internal attributes but ignoring the surrounding context
Literature has significantly contributed to what ad information content is and how it differs across different media, product category, and cultures, only a few studies have investigated how information content influences consumers’ responses to ad and brand

Summary

Introduction

The type of ad information has a strong impact on consumer responses to ads, firms and brands (Abernethy & Franks, 1996). Content analysis has been criticized as Scholars argue – and empirical studies have documented–that advertising whose appeals are congruent with cultural orientations should be more persuasive (An, 2013; Daechun, 2007; Glenn et al, 1977; Han & Shavitt, 1994). According to Nisbett et al (2001), Eastern Asians and Westerners have different thinking styles. Eastern Asians and Westerners may have different attitudes toward advertisements that contain different types of information. In this paper, we apply the analytic and holistic thinking style differences to advertising to investigate whether people with different thinking styles would generate different attitudes toward advertisements that contain different types of information

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