Ethnic food advertising formats and consumers’ responses: Picture-dominant or text-dominant?

Abstract

Ethnic restaurant markets are proliferating due to expanding consumer demand for global flavors. This study investigated the most effective advertising formats for encouraging U.S. consumers to eat ethnic foods. This study compared the effectiveness of picture-dominant advertisements (food-focused vs. spokesperson-focused) and text-dominant advertisements with two different text lengths (short vs. long). The two experiments in this study found that the spokesperson-focused ad was more effective for customers with cultural familiarity. This study also found that a detailed description of the ethnic food was evaluated more highly in terms of cognitive understanding than the short summary. The text-dominant ads were significantly more effective than the picture-dominant ads for individuals who were unfamiliar with the culture of the cuisine’s country of origin. The results suggest that marketers need to increase customers’ attention by customizing advertising formats based on target customers with varied levels of cultural familiarity.