Cultural influence on visual depiction of advertising appeals across the U.S. and Chinese business magazines

Although there is an abundance of literature on cross-cultural comparisons of advertising appeals, very little is known about how culture influences visual depiction of advertising appeals. Due to the fact that luxury products convey much of their distinctiveness through visual metaphors, the present research addresses the cultural influence by examining how Hofstede's culture dimensions are reflected in the visual composition of advertisements for luxury products in U.S. and Chinese business magazines. With expected increased consumption of luxury goods in China in the coming years, a cross-cultural study comparing visual depiction of advertising appeals for luxury products and salient cultural values would be useful to both practitioners and researchers from the United States and China.;A content-analysis driven by semiotic analysis was used to investigate 220 unduplicated ads for luxury products (112 from China and 108 from the United States), published in the 2007 U.S. and Chinese editions of Forbes and Fortune magazines. Results show that six out of 18 studied advertising appeals correlated significantly with Hofstede's culture dimensions. The results suggest that culture partially influenced visual depiction of advertising appeals in both U.S. and Chinese business magazines. The research also identified some commonalities in visual composition between the U.S. and Chinese advertisements.