A Cross-cultural Study On Cultural Values Reflected In Chinese And American Automobile Advertisements

Advertising is not merely a commercial information carrier. It is like a mirror that canreflect the cultural values of a certain country or group. By making a comparison of culturalvalues reflected in Chinese and American auto ads, this paper aims at exploring whatdifferences and similarities there are in the cultural values and why.The theoretical foundations of this essay are Hofstede’s value dimensions theory, Hall’stheory, Cluckhohn et al and Strodtbeck’s value orientations theory. The analytical data of thispaper are120auto ads,60in Chinese and60in English taken from Chinese financialmagazines such as China Economic Weekly, Financial Community, business circle, etc. andAmerican financial magazines such as Fortune, Forbes, Economist, etc. Both Chinese andAmerican magazines are issued in2013and2014.Firstly, a comparative analysis of the120Chinese and American auto ads is made fromthree aspects of advertising appeal: advertising target, advertising content and advertisingstrategy. After the analysis, this paper finds: in terms of advertising target, the pursuit ofindividualism can be found in both Chinese and American auto ads. The differences lie in thatthe pursuit of individualism in English auto ads is more direct and obvious than that in Chineseauto ads. Moreover, most Chinese auto ads are customer-focused while most American autoads are product-focused; in terms of advertising content, the amount of information containedin Chinese auto ads is larger than that in the American ones. In addition, Chinese auto ads aremore comprehensive and they pay more attention to tradition in the choices of advertisingslogans. Both Chinese and American auto ads are present-oriented to some degree; in terms ofadvertising strategy, Chinese ads mainly adopt the combination of emotional strategy andrational strategy while American ads mainly adopt rational strategy. What’s more, Chinesemanufactures prefer to use different persuading strategies such as celebrity endorsement,listing the honors achieved, stating that parts of the car components are imported from abroadin order to stress the status of their products. Then, under the guidance of cross-culturaltheories, this paper will make a contrast of the above findings from four aspects of culturaldifferences: collectivism vs. individualism, power distance, high-and low-context and M-timevs. P-time, past-oriented vs. future-oriented. The results of the comparison are: Chinese autoads pursue individualism; the power distance in Chinese samples is higher than that in theAmerican ones; both of them are present-oriented; Chinese auto ads adopt low-contextcommunication model rather than high-context model; Chinese samples show P-time feature while American samples M-time. At last, this paper attempts to explore the root of theformation of cultural differences of the two countries from historical and philosophicalbackgrounds. In addition, the reasons for findings inconsistent with cross-cultural theories willalso be covered.Thus, this paper comes to the conclusion that cultural value has a great influence onadvertising. However, the cultural values reflected in advertising appeals in Chinese andAmerican auto ads are not completely consistent with cultural differences in the two countries,meaning that culture is not the only influencing factor in advertising. Globalization, thedifferences between China and America in economic development level and the characteristicsof automobile products are all possible reasons for these phenomena.