Marketing Signals And Box Office Performance In Film Trade Under The Background Of Cross-Culture

Film is an important part of trade in cultural goods. The exported film products gaining high box-office performance mainly manifest the film industry in exporting country has the international competitiveness. Also that is a symbol of Cultural Power. Because of film’s intangible and experiential nature, it’s difficult for consumers to assess the real quality of a film thus searching and dealing with relative marketing-signals to reduce uncertainty. However, consumers under different national culture have cognitive style differences on the same signal which could lead to film trade risks. Therefore, the research on how exporters utilize marketing signals when exporting film products to impact on consumer purchase decisions thus improving box-office performance is of great significance.On the theoretical basis of film-relative signal influencing on domestic box-office performance, this paper concludes four signals which are sequels, production budget, star power and word-of-mouth and introduce Hofstede’s national cultural dimensions to construct a theoretical framework about how national cultural dimensions moderate the process of signals influencing on overseas box-office performance under the background of film globalization and then further explore the mechanism of how importing countries’consumer purchase decisions are influenced by national culture thus impacting on film exporting. Based on 11004 groups of data of 262 films in 42 countries and regions during 2009 to 2014, this paper conducts an empirical analysis of the above influence and moderation with HLM model. The results show that the positive relationship between sequels and box-office performance wanes in individualist cultures while movies with high production budgets perform better in high power distance cultures and indulgent cultures. The positive relationship between star power and box office performance declines in indulgent cultures while public praise affects box office performance more significantly in indulgent and high uncertainty avoidance cultures.Exporters of film should recognize the cultural characteristics of importing countries, and select appropriate market signals in propaganda to enhance the box office performance and export competitiveness. At last, this paper investigates the status quo of film industry and trade in China and makes some related suggestions on Chinese film importing and exporting about how to select film-relative signals to promote box-office returns combined with above theoretical analysis and empirical research conclusions.