Interesting Results
Culture and Advertising
The question, “When does culture matter?”, forms part of the title of a 2006 article1. The answer, based on a series of experiments described in the article, is when people are not able to devote much attention to processing information. The experiments were aimed at understanding whether people perceive ads conveying culturally consistent messages more positively than ads conveying other types of messages. The results suggest that they do, but only when not a lot of effort is put into processing the information in the ads — for example, when the person viewing the ad has limited time or is multi-tasking. The results of the experiments suggest that when people can devote greater attention to advertisements, this tendency for evaluations to be based on cultural consistency is eliminated.
1 Briley, Donnel A. and Jennifer L. Aaker (2006), “When Does Culture Matter? Effects of Personal Knowledge on the Correction of Culture-Based Judgments”, Journal of Marketing Research, 43(3), 395-408.