Multilingual print advertisements and cosmopolitanism: Associations, perceptions, and attitudes triggered by foreign interrupts

Multilingual advertisement has become increasingly common across the globe. Research on this topic, however, remains scarce. This dissertation extends multilingual advertising research by empirically testing country-of-origin assumptions in relation to multilingual advertisement research and by introducing cosmopolitanism to the field. The focus on multilingual advertisements is relatively new in the field of advertisement and not much empirical work has been conducted yet. The concept of a product's country-of-origin influencing the effectiveness of a multilingual advertisement has been largely accepted and adapted by multilingual advertisement researchers without rigorous empirical testing. Cosmopolitanism has not yet been used in multilingual advertisement research despite its fit with the topic.;The stream of multilingual advertisement has so far largely focused on identifying multilingual advertisements in various countries and has only recently moved towards analyzing the effects multilingual advertisements can have on consumers. Particularly the liking of multilingual advertisements has been examined.;We attempt to fill the research gap between assumptions about effects of multilingual advertisements and actual effects on consumer perceptions. We examine the following research questions: What role does a foreign interrupt play in effecting people's beliefs and attitudes towards the advertised brand? Is the impact of the foreign interrupt's effect affected by the fit between the foreign interrupt and the product's country-of-origin? What role does cosmopolitanism play in an individual's evaluation of the brand's use of a foreign interrupt?;An integrative approach that adopts established theories such as country-of-origin and cosmopolitanism is applied to examine multilingual advertisements' impact on the perception of quality, the brand, and the advertisement itself. Hypotheses testing is conducted in both the U.S. and in Switzerland.