A Contrastive Study Of The Cultural Values ​​of Chinese And American News Magazines

Advertising is not only an economic activity and a kind of communication behavior, but also a cultural product. As part of social culture, advertising is influenced by the social culture deeply. So, as a core of culture, cultural values also deeply root in the commercials. However, different countries, nations, or regions have their unique culture and values. These differences will be reflected in the ads inevitably. This article aims to explore the different values between Chinese magazine ads and the US magazine ads. After comparing with the results of previous studies, I try to analysis the emergence of new trends and causes in the international background.This study based on the Dutch psychologist Hofstede’s values dimension, the values of anthropologists Florence Kluckhohn and Fred Strodtbeckde’s fundamental issues and the values of high-context and low-context cultures Hall’s theory. As a result, I have four dimensions to measure cultural values. They are individualism and collectivism, time orientation (past, present and future), masculinity and femininity, high-context and low-context culture. The samples of this study are printed in the magazines "Newsweek" and "China Newsweek", which is from2012-01to2013-06. Finally I will use these274ads samples to analysis and compare the cultural values between American and china magazine advertisingThe results showed that the U.S. magazine ads have a distinct characteristic of individualism, while Chinese magazine ads have not obvious characteristics of collectivism, and there have even more pronounced individualism characteristic. In the time-oriented dimension, the U.S. magazine ads showed a clear "now-oriented," while China’s magazine ads also showed a clear "now-oriented". This is different from the traditional tendency of Chinese which are inured to the long-term orientation. In the dimension of masculinity and femininity, the U.S. magazine ads has the same index and Chinese magazine ads showed a more obvious tendency of masculinity, which conformed to the typical feature of Chinese society. In the high-context and low-context culture dimension, U.S. magazine ads show a clear "low-context" feature, while Chinese magazine ads has "high-context" features that was weakened significantly.The results showed that the changes in the Chinese culture were cultural values of Chinese advertising nowadays. One of reasons was the shock of Western culture. The problem of cultural transmission was put out when we answered how to deal with the challenge and created a new cultural system,1believe that there are two ways. One is to enhance the level of consciousness of Chinese culture, and the other is to promote the modernization and globalization of Chinese culture. They will provide lots of helps for the development of China’s advertising and the rise of Chinese culture, that multi-level cultural communication policies, positive cultural communication and exchange, realistic sense of self-reflection. and the power of government, society and the media.