Cross Cultural Advertising

Culture is an important part of each society and it clearly has an impact on people’s behavior. This impact is a key factor for a science like advertising which targets to influence behaviors. McCarty (1994) as cited in Englis, and Dahl (2004) claimed that culture and values have their importance when talking about people’s reaction to advertising. Callow and Shiffman (2002) found a difference between people from high context and low context communication system in the ability to understand implicit meaning of advertisement. Ewing, Salzberger and Sinkovics (2005) conducted a study on “how a pluralistic audience perceives a standardized television advertisement” and found dissimilarities between indigenous and nonindigenous people. O’Barr (1993) cited a social historian who considers advertisement as an edited and selected view of a society which clearly illustrates the relationship between advertisements and the culture within a specific society. Despite the abundant literature on this topic, there is no research studying the Moroccan context. The Moroccan society is special in the way that Moroccans watch both Moroccan and foreign TVs and are then exposed to different types of advertisements. The culture is an important component of each society and it is clearly influencing people’s perceptions, especially concerning advertisement, which mainly relies on people’s behavior. Is it possible for a multinational company to use the same advertisement campaign in every country where it can be implanted? Companies always want to attract people in order to gain more consumers and they use advertisement as a tool. While watching some foreign advertisements on TV, are Moroccans going to react as foreigners? The Moroccan culture still has many taboos and people would certainly not accept advertisements with sexual connotations for instance. The reactions might also differ if the targeted public is from an individualistic or a collectivist society. The principal purpose of... [continues]

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