Now day advertising has craftily become an certain companion of modern life that we can’t escape and keep away from, in fact its an intrinsic part of our daily lives. Everyone’s daily life and the life of many purchasers is affected by advertising. Consumer use advertising for its in-formativeness, as well as its entertainment value (Hoch and john Deighton 1989). It provides them with cues and clues to help, understand and appreciate their feelings. And in this manners it can change the nature of the response. Advertising helps consumers interpret these experiences and it recommend what should be noticed. When advertising works in this manner, it can exert an insidious effect on consumer behaviour.
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The importance and power of advertising, is not only just so much economic, but cultural. “Advertising is not just a business expenditure undertaken in the hope of moving some merchandise off the store shelves, but is rather an integral part of modern culture” (Goldman, & Montagne,1986) Its significance comes in impact in consumer capitalism, where individuals depend on it for meanings, a basis of social information embedded in commodities that mediate interpersonal relations and personal identity. Advertising should therefore be conceived as an important institution in the consumer society because it produces “patterned systems of meaning” that play a key role in individual socialization and social reproduction. As to Encouraging current users to increase consumption of a product, generating more sales leads, increasing brand awareness, increasing repeat purchases, and supporting the personal selling effort are some specific objectives for advertising.
As China hastens its transformation to a market economy, its advertising industry has witnessed one of the fastest expansion rates in the world. However very few researches have been done on Chinese advertising industry though there are many researches in advertising in the western world. The key issue remains how to establish whether there are important differences in cultural values among nations and to what degree those values affect advertising effectiveness.
Problem of the Statement
Since advertising start booming in China in the early 1979, it has become significantly an increasing important industry in the country. Many researchers have been made on advertising industry in the west and became one of everyday activity in the current market. However researches on Chinese advertising has generally been limited to journal articles, and chapters in books devoted to international advertising or international marketing as a whole.
The entering of foreign advertising, growth, and operation in China has big significance to Chinese society and culture in general and to Chinese advertising in particular. Major western advertisement companies that are present in China are playing big role in changing the culture of new generations to the new era of modernization. As companies based in the United States and Europe continue to expand their markets globally, China, with its one billion plus population, has become a favourable market. Although these companies have attempted to implement Western-style advertising in China, most have yet to make substantial headway into the Chinese consumer awareness. The relative “newness” of advertising as a social phenomenon in China has created great difficulties for measuring advertising or marketing success in China (Lohtia, Wesley, and Linda (1994).
These difficulties stem, in large measure, from Westerners’ lack of understanding of how to market their products and services directly to consumers in an ancient Eastern culture such as China. As advertising is a cultural product in its own right, when the East meets the West without a conjoining point, the marketing costs borne by advertisers could be unexpectedly exorbitant; such costs may come in the guise of missed opportunities or, worse yet, a battered product image. This argument lends support to proponents of the “specialization” approach in global advertising, even though the barriers to developing that specialized advertising approach may be many and difficult to anticipate (Donthu, Naveen, 1998). Moreover as far as legal issues concerned until the recent time the absence of clearly provided law on the area is another major problem for the industry and created vacuum for illegal advertisers, As a result big number of customers get in to trouble by unfair advertisement.
The Purpose of the Study
The purpose of our research is to investigate how consumers interpret and understand advertising that uses global or local appeals in China. Many companies are interested in the enormous potential of this world’s most populous market, which now also has the fastest-expanding advertising industry in the world.
The country is awash in a mix of foreign and local goods, images, advertising appeals, and consumption ideas, and as a whole, there has been an increase in using Western appeals in advertising (Zhou, Nan, and Linming Meng, 1998) while at the same time, foreign advertisers tend to adapt their advertising to a Chinese context to varying degrees. Based on the above mentioned situations the purpose of the study is to examine cultural values as reflected in Western and Chinese advertising appeals.
Also purpose of this study is also to assess a consumer-response approach to learn how Chinese consumers react to television and print advertisements with varying emphases on the global, foreign, or Western advertisings with regard to cultural differences to read the advertisements.
The purpose of this research is also to examine what role advertising is playing in marketing and how it peruse people. Particularly what is the image of Chinese people on the development of advertising in China and to identify how they merge it to their own culture. Moreover we will try to examine which channel or media is the most preferable to advertise in the Chinese society.
By learning more about the interplay of culture and advertising, marketing and advertising managers are in a better position to decide whether advertising using global appeals or local appeals is more appropriate for communicating with Chinese consumers.
Research Methodology
As mentioned before, books and other research documents are very limited for Chinese advertising industry. So the study is an explorative qualitative study and all primary and secondary data has been assessed in qualitative way rather than numerical or quantitative method. The primary data comes from the interviews and direct information is used from selected enterprises and factories, from their annual reports and different related resources materials.
The selected companies are from different industries such as: food, cosmetics, fashion, medicine and in the same time consumers that have been selected are from somehow related to those industries. In addition direct verbal interview were performed with some of the managers from the selected factories.
Conclusion (part of)
Although the scale of foreign investment in the advertising industry is relatively small, it has helped introduce advanced technologies, management experience and talented personnel to the industry, and has improved the overall level of China’s advertising industry. Despite some controversial foreign advertisements hurt the feelings of some local consumers but still foreign advertising companies are doing well and making huge contribution for the development of advertising industry in China.
Regarding cultural issue Chinese companies and consumers are not facing only marketing challenges but also cultural challenges from international adv companies. According to the finding, in one way or another Chinese young generation is dominated by western custom and culture, so local companies should move fast to protect the culture from western cultural invasion.
As the most dominant advertising medium, television was the most likely to be remembered and talked about. As a result according our finding many big and medium companies chooses TV as the best media to advertise their product and service. However many small local enterprises chooses newspaper and flyers.
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