An Empirical Study On Cross-cultural Advertising Of Luxury Commodities

As the globalization of world economy proceeds, the multinational corporations have endeavored to intensify their business transactions around the world. Among their marketing strategies, the mass publicity method of cross-cultural advertising has gained special attention, thus bringing the academic circle into fervent discussion on the topic. One of the subjects under scrutiny was luxury commodity which has made its way into public attention by its increasing value and unique charm. Due to its highly iconic and advanced cultural characters, it justifies the choice of making the advertisements on luxury commodity as a standard text for analyzing cross-cultural advertising strategies. Meanwhile, China's most recent economic boom has led to the large scale domestication of foreign luxury commodities. The studying of the promotional materials by the foreign investors in China is very valuable towards the understanding of the cross-cultural dissemination of advertisements, considering the differences between China and the West.As stated above, this thesis will analyze the cross-cultural advertising strategies of luxury commodities by studying the advertisements released by foreign luxury commodity producers, and the discussions will follow the principles provided by cross-cultural dissemination theories. This thesis has adopted methodology models developed by overseas scholars and has also made justifications in accordance with each specific case. The cross-cultural advertisements of luxury commodities have been quantified in this thesis by using semiotics and content-analyzing methods, while each case study will bring the cross-cultural promotional strategies into discussion by analyzing the level of standardization of its advertisements texts. Such methodology is the first ever in China.The purpose of this study is to solve the following questions through theoretical analysis and case studies:1. What kind of advertising strategies do the luxury commodity makers use in China?2. Why do they choose such strategies?3. What are the major constraints against the further development of such strategies?The thesis is divided into three major parts in accordance with the methodology of the study:First of all, like any other academic studies, this thesis is based on extensive literature review and documentations. The purpose of literature review is to summarize the results of previous studies and their methodologies, and then to further the understanding of the advertising strategies of luxury commodities. The value of literature is to provide a theoretical framework for the whole study.The main part of the thesis will focus on the empirical study of the level of standardization of luxury commodity promotion texts. The thesis firstly develops a standardization/domestication system for the visual promotion of luxury commodities by analyzing the results from the first stage of research, which can be deemed as a weighing system of the factors contributing to the visual promotion of luxuries. The next step is to analyze a significant amount of visual advertisements of luxury commodities in China through semiotic and content-oriented approaches, and this process yields a rough evaluation of the standardization/domestication levels of luxuries. If the results of the previous stages were to be combined, it will give a weighed grade for the standardization process. Then through numerical statistic analysis, the thesis will examine the hypotheses and reach reasonable conclusions.The remaining task of the study is to analyze foreign luxury commodity makers'China promotion strategies on a deeper level, so that the thesis could provide suggestions on relevant questions.The overall goal of this thesis is to study the dissemination of cross-cultural advertising, which in turn serves the purpose of filling in the blank of the same kind of research in China. Hopefully, this study will also be able to lead to further researches in the same field and provide useful methodologies and ideas. Another contribution by this thesis, namely, the empirical research results of luxury commodity advertising strategies from the combined studies through publicity theories, semiotics, and luxury commodity marketing theories, will have practical value to Chinese enterprises.