Abstract
Humor has been widely used in advertising in recent decades. Various studies found that humor could significantly improve advertising performance. However, most of these studies were conducted in a Eastern context and did not consider cultural factors. In a cross-cultural research framework, the current study explored the effects of advertisement characteristics (i.e., brand nationality and humor tactics) on Chinese and United States audiences’ attitudes toward humorous advertisements. Results showed that the attitudinal differences between Chinese audiences and United States audiences was not significant at the aggregate level. Instead, the differences lie in an audience’s responsiveness to characteristics of the ads. Specifically, while United States audiences showed a strong preference for ads featuring Chinese brands compared to those of United States brands, Chinese audiences did not differentiate them. United States audiences preferred ads using self-enhancing tactics to those using affiliative tactics, whereas, again Chinese audiences did not differentiate. We also explored whether individual differences in cultural values could account for the effect of audience nationality. Results suggest that differences embedded in culture groups, as indicated by audience nationality, could not be explained or substituted by individual variance in humor tolerance and uncertainty avoidance. Limitations and future directions were discussed.
Highlights
Every year, Clio Awards, the Oscars of advertising, present an award named, “Best Use of Humor” (Buijzen and Valkenburg, 2004)
Given that the four styles identified in Martin’s humor model were originally formulated in a North American individualistic context, we suggest that Western audiences could favor the self-enhancing humorous advertisements because of the exaggerated expressions focusing on the independent “self.” Eastern audiences from collective cultures, may differentiate these tactics to a lesser extent, given their interdependent self-construal blurring the boundaries between the self and others (Taher et al, 2008)
We conducted a univariate analysis of covariance to test the prediction that the Chinese audience and the United States audience hold different attitudes toward humorous advertisements depending on humor tactics and brand nationality, controlling for age, gender, and income
Summary
Clio Awards, the Oscars of advertising, present an award named, “Best Use of Humor” (Buijzen and Valkenburg, 2004) This shows that have using humor been a common practice in the advertising business, and been highly recognized of its economic values in commercials. In order to show the original taste and flavor of the drink, an anthropomorphic lemon is standing on the edge of the cup and peeing into the lemon drink It has achieved good communication effects among Western audiences, but many Chinese audiences feel uncomfortable about it. This discomfort exists because people in different cultures hold strikingly different attitudes toward humor (Kuiper et al, 2010; Yue et al, 2016) and humorous advertising. Do audiences from different cultural contexts hold different attitudes toward the same humorous advertisement? If yes, could these differences be explained by individual differences concerning cultural values? To answer the above questions, we compared evaluations of audiences from different cultures concerning advertisements varying in brand nationalities and tactics
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