A Cross-Cultural Investigation of Emotional Expressions in Advertising: Based on TV Commercial Analyses of Four Countries

Abstract

Since people's ways to express their feeling in daily situations or mass communication context may be diverse or universal across culture, this topic is likely to be of academic interests. However, such an issue has been rarely discussed yet because traditional cultural dimensions (e.g., those proposed by Hofstede and Hall) were limited in providing researchers with direct support for explanation and prediction regarding the issue. This study attempted to examine how an individual's emotional expressions in the advertising context differ by culture using the neutrality-affectivity dimension, a relatively new cultural perspective proposed by Trompennars and Hampden-Turner. A total of 1,024 TV commercials from the selected four countries - Korea, Japan, U.S., and U.K.- were analyzed for the cross-national comparisons. Results indicate a higher level of affectivity for U.S. advertising and a higher level of neutrality for Korean and Japanese advertising in general. U.K. advertising, however, was revealed to lack the properties of affectivity, contrary to the prediction. Based on the findings, theoretical and managerial implications were discussed, as were suggestions for future research.