Content Analysis of Advertisements in Different Cultures

Increasingly, advertising examples are being analyzed and used as yet another form of communication, on account of their ubiquity (e.g. billboards, Internet, television, magazines). Designed to compel us to purchase products, advertisements have the potential to greatly impact our lives. %ey show current trends in social preferences, they reveal cultural values and norms of the target audience and, $nally, they can be the mirror of the times people live in. %e purpose of this paper is to give a brief overview of the $ndings in previously carried–out research relating to cross–cultural content analysis of advertisements. %e reports have addressed both linguistic and extra–linguistic features and trends in advertising and emphasized language– and culture–speci$c elements. %is paper also gives ideas for future studies, since nowadays, due to international marketing and increasing globalization there are more cultural transfers to be explored, as cultures are coming in contact far more frequently.


Introduction
Cross-cultural analysis of advertisements has long been at the very centre of researchers' interest, since a thorough investigation into that matter leads to numerous and useful cultural data.In particular, such analysis may manifest current trends in social preferences, reveal cultural values and norms of the target audience and, nally, be a mirror of the times people live in.
is paper provides a brief overview of the ndings in the previous research relating to crosscultural content analysis of advertisements.Generally speaking, the idea of comparing and contrasting languages and cultures as re ected in advertisements comes from the interest in international marketing and increasing globalization.Nowadays, since cultures are coming in contact far more frequently, the question of cultural in uences and, possibly, transfer, is yet again a current issue to be explored.Equally exploited is the aspect of cross-cultural comparison and contrast of advertisements from industrialized countries, on the one hand, and countries in transition, on the other.
Reports in the previous research have addressed both linguistic and extra-linguistic features and trends in advertising and emphasized language-and culture-speci c elements.Due to limitless potential for data collection when analyzing advertisements, researchers have both dedicated their work to linguistic strategies in the constructed text of the advertisement and its in uential capacity to persuade future customers, and to extra-linguistic strategies in the images and the role they play in the overall message.e numerous studies have dealt with di erent product types and focused on di erent aspects, such as the investigation of images in advertisements aimed at men and women, the comparison of advertising strategies of the same types of products in di erent cultures, the exploration of the underlying messages and ideas in advertisements, to name just a few.
Further, this paper provides some ideas for future studies, since in the era of technological improvements, web advertisements have taken precedence over the earlier forms of advertising and these advertisements' impact cannot be ignored.Not only can such an analysis lead to insights into cross-cultural di erences and similarities in advertising strategies and expressions, but it can also help understand what cultural values, norms and stereotypes are manifested in various advertising strategies and expressions across several countries.

Content Analysis -Definition
Virtually all disciplines within the humanities and social sciences are now concerned with the functions and e ects of symbols, meanings and messages.In recent years, with the emergence of the information society, texts, contexts, images, interfaces, and, above all, information are now being widely researched (Krippendor 2004, xvii).
One of the ways to approach the description of the content of any media text, such as advertisements, is content analysis.Krippendor (2004, 18) de nes it as "a research technique for making replicable and valid inferences from texts (or other meaningful matter) to the contexts of their use".In other words, content analysis is an analytic approach based on the identi cation and quanti cation of signi cant categories of content within a text (both verbal and visual elements), but also the examination of the relationship among those categories.is basically means that a certain meaning can be assigned to the recurrent element, be it visual or verbal, and therefore it can reveal the underlying messages.Dyer (1982, 108) emphasizes that the basic assumption of this research procedure is that there is a relation between: a. the existence and frequency of certain content items in a text, most often verbally represented, and the intentions of the text producer on the one hand, and b. the responses of the audience, on the other.
As Krippendor (2004, 58-9) points out, in mass communication research, analysts typically measure di erent indices to address extratextual phenomena, ve of which have had a long history of use: 1. the presence or absence of a concept indicates the source's awareness or knowledge of the object referred to; 2. the frequency of the occurrence of an idea in a stream of messages indicates the importance of that idea; 3. the numbers of favourable and unfavourable characteristics attributed to an idea indicate the attitudes held by the writers, the readers, or their common culture toward the object indicated; 4. the kinds of adjectives or hedges used in statements about an idea indicate the intensity or uncertainty associated with the beliefs and motivations that the idea signi es; 5. the frequency of co-occurrence of two concepts (excluding those that have grammatical or collocational explanations) indicates the strength of associations between those concepts in the minds of the audience.
is paper cites studies which have dealt with various variables and features, and hence they will be separately emphasized when mentioned, since they are not uniform in regard to the content, i.e. not all the research is restricted to the frequency of items in the text.

Types of Research
Broadly speaking, there are two types of research dealing with content analysis of advertisements in di erent cultures, one addressing possible cultural transfer and the other, cultural comparison.

Cultural Transfer
Modern multinational companies often market exactly the same product in a number of di erent countries.Cultural transfer implies transfer of that product along with its advertising strategies from one culture to another (e.g.international brands, such as Coca-Cola, Nokia, Volvo etc.), keeping in view cultural di erences among nations.Goddard (1998, 80) refers to this process as copy adaptation and de nes it as the process of "adapting the text to t the culture of its targeted group" with the aim of conveying the message properly and e ciently, because encoding of concepts may vary from culture to culture.Medawar (1979, 17) introduces the term taste transfer, which, according to him, does not imply any transfer, but is limited to the introduction of imported, high-technology and high-cost goods, usually of relatively poor value in relation to locally-available alternatives and very often unsuited to local needs.Ahmed (2000, 13) points out that advertisements should not neglect cultural di erences among nations, and that the advertising policy of standardization should be substituted by localized solutions which are more e cient in getting its communication across.Cultural factors may have a signi cant impact on the way the product and its advertising message would be perceived by the consumers of that culture.
One example of advertising failure, where the di erences in cultural attitudes and values were ignored, was Volvo's attempt in 1990 to market a car in the same way across the whole of Europe.e campaign was soon dropped through lack of response, and Volvo went back to some previously accepted traditions and market preferences, hence focusing in the UK and Switzerland on safety, in France on status, in Sweden on value, in Germany on performance (Brierley 1995, 18).
Even the knowledge of the textual system is cultural.In western cultures, texts operate from left to right and this way of reading represents the foundation stone for many 'before and after' sequences.However, unlike the west, the textual ordering is totally opposite in the Middle East.
is simple di erence was not taken into account when a large soap powder manufacturer from the West advertised in the Middle East without making any changes to the advert, apart from a verbal translation.erefore, for Arabic readers, the product was o ering to turn their clothes from snowy white to grimy grey, which consequently resulted in the disappointing sale of the product (Goddard 1998, 79).Cultural diversity and translation problems discourage standardization of advertising messages.Goddard (1998, 80-4), further, thinks that the area of verbal translation is the clearest way in which cultural variations can be demonstrated and mentions brand names as examples of failures when companies go international or global with their products.e reasons for this are various, sometimes the brand name has negative and connotatively coloured associations in other languages (for connotations in perfume and car names and ads, cf.Cook 1992, 101-14).For example, some of the products that fail the connotation test for English speaking audiences are toilet paper Kräpp, lemonade Pschitt, creamy powder Creap, cereals Crapsy fruit and others.In addition, there are idiomatic mistranslations, as in the Pepsi slogan Come alive with the Pepsi generation, which was translated into Chinese as 'Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead' or Kentucky Fried Chicken's nger licking' good translated in Chinese as 'eat your nger o '. e sound system of a language can also play its part in the creation of meaning.For instance, sequences of syllables in one language may be di erent words in another, as was the case with the British car model e Vauxhall Nova, which bemused its Spanish audience, for whom 'no va' means 'won't go'.
Apart from the analysis of cultural transfer, there is another type of research centred around nding cross-cultural similarities and di erences.

Cultural Comparison
Cultural comparison presents the process of nding similarities and di erences in advertisements of the same type of products in di erent cultures (e.g.food and drinks, cosmetic products, cars, mobile phones, bank services, insurance, etc.).Both verbal and visual elements are interpreted and compared, sometimes separately, sometimes as the combination which constitutes the message.Cultural comparison leads to the identi cation of advertising strategies and norms, which can, further, result in better understanding of (a) aspects of advertising shared across several countriesstandardization and (b) aspects of advertising that need to be adapted to local culturescustomization.Cross-cultural understanding must be imperative since it can formulate e ective localized advertising that would re ect the cultural values and norms of its intended audience (Ahmed 2000, 13).
In the following part of the paper, the studies discussing cultural comparison will be presented in more detail.Especially interesting are the papers and discussions which revealed speci c similarities and di erences between one western industrialized country and one eastern country in transition, so they will be addressed separately.

Types of Approaches
e approaches to the analysis of advertisements in the same or di erent culture can be roughly divided into linguistic and semiotic approaches.Some of the most quoted and appreciated linguistic approaches are Leech (1966), Dyer (1982), Cook (1992), Myers (1994), to name just a few; whilst the best-known semiotic approaches to advertising are Barthes (1972), Williamson (1978), as well as Creedon and Cramer (2007) and McCracken (1993) who focused on representation of women in mass communication.Vestergaard and Schrøder's (1985) research is more sociological and less linguistic, and the authors illustrate the range of techniques advertisers use to achieve emphasis and particular e ects.
However, not always is there such a clear-cut distinction between two approaches, even in the aforementioned works, as they merge within one research.Another example is Tanaka's analysis (1994) of British and Japanese print advertisements with the focus on metaphors, puns and images of women.

Linguistic Approach -Analysis of Verbal Aspect
Linguists have dealt with the analysis of language of advertising from the linguistic point of view and speci ed linguistic means and devices used in advertising texts: Leech's (1966) work on English-language advertising in 1960s Britain highlights the extensive repertoire of linguistic choices available to copywriters when creating advertising material; Rees (1982) shows how slogans have been used; Cook (1992) focuses on parallelism, metaphor, metonymy, homophones, puns, parody and rhyme, and Myers (1994) includes alliteration, assonance, rhyme, homophones, question forms, ellipsis, parallelism and puns.In a general survey, Brierley (1995) lists language games, repetition, similes, parallelism, paradox, omission and ambiguity, while Tanaka (1994) concentrates on the use of puns and metaphors, etc. ese studies reveal some common characteristics and structures of advertisements across cultures: at the phonological level: alliteration, rhythm and rhyme, repetition, sound symbolism, at the orthographical level: deviations in spelling, capitalization, at the lexical level: trigger words, brand names, slogans, catch phrases, at the grammatical level: structural simplicity, ellipsis, superlatives, at the semantic level: metaphors, metonymy, word plays, ambiguity, at the pragmatic level: direct appeal to the recipients, speech acts of persuasion.
is list does not attempt to be exhaustive, but only tries to emphasize the fact that some features are uniform and present the culture.Advertisers also often use in ated language or even invent the new language ('word magic').All of these characteristics of advertising language have the same functions -catching our attention and imagination, increasing recognition and enhancing the memorizing e ect, making the advertisement easy to repeat and remember (Dyer 1982, 140;Leech 1966, 29).
In addition to textual analysis and interpretation of verbal content, the important visual elements have been analyzed, since images are also important in reference to the text, as the combination of these two constitutes elements of the message in advertisements.

Semiotic Approach -Analysis of Visual Aspect
Apart from verbal analysis, the data collected can be examined in terms of the visual constituents, their features and the way they construct certain ideas alongside verbal text.When analyzing the visual aspect of advertisements, it is important to identify the constituents of a picture and relate these to themes and concepts and wider cultural meanings (Dyer 1982, 94).She, further, adds that even the simplest images are interpreted and reproduced di erently in di erent cultures.In other words, what we see is greatly in uenced by our previous knowledge, cultural traditions and experience, which shape our reality and constrain our perception.e picture in the advertisement rst attracts the reader's attention and usually has more impact than words, which are often used merely to reinforce it.Positive feelings and attitudes can be provoked when associating a product with happy families, dreams and fantasy, successful romance, celebrities, beautiful women, childhood, nature, etc. Images are used to construct the messages, which would, if verbally expressed, sound silly.As Myers (1994, 136) vividly explains it: We would laugh at the claim that a soap would make anyone beautiful, if this claim were put in words, but if it is implied by a picture of a beautiful woman holding the soap, our sceptical faculties are not invoked.
Concerning the visual aspect, gender stereotyping was one of thoroughly-examined research topics, in particular the question of whether and to what extent gender stereotypes are reinforced through images.
Gender is routinely portrayed according to traditional cultural stereotypes: women are shown as 'sex objects', housewives or mothers, while men are shown in situations of authority and dominance over women (Dyer 1982, 97-8).Among the most typical stereotypical portrayals of women, the following are most notable: the women should be at home, they depend upon men, they cannot make any important and responsible decisions, they are rarely shown in their working environment or are shown doing jobs belonging to lower social status, they are seen as sexual objects (Creedon 1993, 202).e problem lies in the fact that repeated exposure to such stereotypical portrayals reinforces traditional roles in the society, which should be, conversely, re-examined and reconstructed according to the changes in social values brought about by the women's liberation movement.Otherwise, advertising will continue to symbolically degrade women.e ndings about gender role portrayals in advertising may reveal how gender roles are changing in the societies, and to what extent the images of gender in advertising are keeping pace with social change (Ahmed 2000, 12).Although the USA was boasting about the women's liberation movement, Klassen, Jasper and Schartz (1993) examined how men and women are portrayed in magazine advertisements in that country and found that a high number of adverts portrayed women in traditional poses relative to adverts that featured men and women together as equals.However, the traditional portrayals of women have been decreasing since the early 1980s and "equality portrayals" are increasing.

Comparison Between Industrialized Countries
Most often the analyzed comparison is made between US advertisements and those of another industrialized country.Weinberger and Spotts (1989) analyzed the information content of television advertisements in Britain and the USA and found that British advertising contained far less information content than American.Biswas, Olsen and Carlet's study of print advertisements from the United States and France in 1992 revealed that French advertisements made greater use of emotional appeal, humour and sex appeal, while the US adverts contained more information cues.Furthermore, Cutler and Javalgi (1992) conducted cross-cultural analysis of the visual components of print advertising from the U.S., France and the UK.Some of the di erences were: the size of the visual, the use of black and white visuals, the size of the product in the visual, the product comparison, while the similarities found were: product portrayal, minority portrayal and elderly portrayal.erefore, the advertising agency should pay attention to the elements in the adverts which can be standardized and uniform and the elements which have to be localized, if the proper message is to be conveyed.Frith and Wesson (1991) examined the manifestation of cultural values in advertising of the United States and England.e study found that American magazine advertisements portrayed characters in more individualistic stances than British ones, while, on the other hand, British advertisements made social class di erences more evident.
All of the aforementioned research papers focused on individualistic societies, i.e. the societies and cultures that place emphasis on individual's goals and values that bene t the individual person (cf.Neuliep 2008).Despite that, it is evident that because of cultural di erences uniform international advertising cannot be e ective.However, there are many studies between the USA, the representative of the individualistic society, and Japan, the collectivistic, in which group goals are more important than the individual's.Mueller (1991) examined the usage of advertising appeals in magazine advertisements of the United States and Japan and concluded that appeals such as product merit and status appeal are universal.Hong, Muderrisoglu and Zinkhan (1987) examined the information content of US and Japanese magazine advertising to determine how advertising expressions and content di ered in the two cultures.e analysis showed that Japanese advertisements were more emotional and less comparative than the US adverts.Cultural di erences may also be re ected in the ways di erent countries emphasize di erent types of information cues in their advertising, because consumers may value various attributes di erently.In Japanese magazine advertising, for example, price information is more often emphasized than in the US advertising.Tanaka (1994) o ers the analysis of the language of written advertising in Britain and Japan.Applying the notions of relevance theory to speci c adverts, she revealed how language is used to persuade, convince and manipulate others.e particular emphasis is placed on the use of puns and metaphors, as well as on images of women in Japanese advertising.rough numerous examples, she shows that pun and metaphor are two frequently exploited linguistic devices for attracting attention in both cultures.Besides, the frequent use of words such as intelligent and individualistic suggest new images of women in Japanese society.However, she concludes, the increased use of these concepts does not reveal a shift to Western values, as may be assumed, but a closer examination, on the contrary, reveals the reinforcement of traditional role models in Japan.Motley and Perry (2010) compared advertisements for home loans in Saudi Arabia and the United States.e results of this cross-cultural analysis suggest that lenders in these two countries utilize similar themes when promoting home loan products, as owning one's own home is something all individuals regardless of culture hope for.However, as a result of interest rates and mortgages, which are prohibited in Islamic law, Saudi Arabian home loans present far less information about the actual costs, while, at the same time, US banks use the interest rate as a key selling point.

Comparison Between Industrialized Countries and Countries in Transition
e majority of cross-cultural content analysis of advertisements compared either two or more western industrialized countries or two or more western and eastern industrialized countries.However, not many analyses have concerned themselves with cross-cultural advertising studies about countries in transition and highly industrialized countries.ere is a great need for a more comprehensive approach, since such comparison may reveal speci c similarities or di erences in cultural values, norms and stereotypes in di erent cultures and show how advertising re ects, reinforces and a ects cultural values of its target audience (Ahmed 2000, 12).In addition, ndings about gender portrayals in advertising may reveal whether and to what extent gender roles are changing in these societies, and whether and to what extent the images of gender in advertising are keeping pace with social changes.
In Medawar's study (1979) on advertising of British food in the third world, there is a clear example of taste transfer and localization of advertisements of products from a developed country (Britain) in undeveloped or developing ones (India and Malaysia).In that survey, Medawar (1979, 42) emphasizes 3 di erent approaches to need-creation, which were evident in Indian and Malaysian adverts: 1. Advertisements which create 'need' by suggesting new -and sometimes silly or unnecessary uses of products.2. Advertisements which create 'need' by getting at people's more vulnerable spots.3. Advertisements which create 'need' through needless product di erentiation and related tactics.
In other words, British advertisements create false need in low-income consumers, who, by purchasing usually functionally useless products, get considerable psychological satisfaction and pretend to live another, better life (Medawar 1979, 57).ey actually try to convince consumers that what is o ered is better than what they use now (e.g.breast-fed milk should be replaced by milk formula, convincing women that such a formula has more nutrients than their milk).
Since the idea for this paper stems from the interest in comparison of an industrialized country, on the one hand, and a country in transition, on the other, the rest of the paper will give a detailed overview of two such studies: Ahmed (2000) and Silaški (2005).

Cross-Cultural Content Analysis of Advertising from the USA and India
is cross-cultural content analysis (Ahmed 2000) compared advertisements for consumer products in nationally circulated news and business magazines in the USA, a representative of a highly individualistic and low-context culture, and India, a representative of a highly collectivist and high-context culture.In a high-context culture, most of the information is either in the physical context or is internalized in the person, very little is in the explicit verbal messages, since the audience is likely to derive meaning from the context.In contrast, in a low-context culture, messages must be explicitly and directly stated through words containing most of the information to be sent; otherwise the communication may fail to be e ective (cf.Neuliep 2008).e focus of this analysis was on linguistic codi cation (informational, directive, poetic, and expressive speech acts), visual codi cation (iconic stance of characters, indexical value transfer, iconic image of women) and combined verbal/visual codi cation (direct and indirect comparative approach).Based on the statistical approach and quanti cation of these elements, this study revealed signi cant di erences in the way the two cultures produced advertising messages and re ected cultural values in their advertising expressions.e ndings could be summarized as follows: 1.
e use of speech acts.e US adverts used both expressive and directive speech acts more often, while the Indian adverts utilized poetic speech acts more frequently.ese ndings are expected, taking into consideration that India is a high-context and the U.S. a low-context culture.

2.
e visual stance of human characters.e US adverts were more likely to use an individualistic stance, and Indian adverts tended to favour a collective stance for human characters.

3.
e stereotypical portrayal of women.A greater percentage of the Indian ads contained stereotypical images of women, while a greater number of the US ads used physical exploitation of women and portrayed women as sex objects.As India is a comparatively more socially conservative and traditional country, these ndings could be anticipated.

4.
e roles of men and women.Indian culture is high on power distance, meaning that power is more unequally distributed, the roles of men and women are more clearly distinguished and the pressure to maintain these distinctions is rather strong.
is cross-cultural study suggests that international advertising cannot be standardized in all countries due to the di erences in cultures.In order to formulate e ective localized advertising, advertisers rst need to understand cultural values and norms of its intended audience.

Cross-Cultural Genre Analysis of Advertisements in Serbian and English
is doctoral dissertation (Silaški 2005) describes the rhetorical structure of advertisements in women's magazines in Serbian and English and establishes similarities and di erences in their semantic and linguistic realizations by using genre analysis as a theoretical and methodological framework.e obtained results show that there are many more cross-cultural di erences than similarities.Silaški points out the following similarities: adverts in Serbian and English have a very similar rhetorical structure and similar lexical and grammatical features.Besides, they reinforce stereotypical images of women as housewives, mothers and 'vamp' women.e di erences are, as expected, more numerous.Here listed are only the most distinguishable ones: 1.
e confessions of known and unknown consumers with the details from personal life (alcoholism, overweight, illnesses in the family etc.) occur only in Serbian adverts.Even anonymous confessions are not characteristic of Anglo-Saxon culture.2. In English adverts rarely do we nd the statements that refer to lower prices of products as one of the main features of the advertised product, unless it is the special price for only a limited period of time.In Anglo-Saxon culture, it may suggest lower quality.In Serbia, advertisers think that low prices represent one of the main advantages in relation to other similar products and services.3.
e mitigating devices, such as 'please', are present only in English adverts, since it collocates with the verbs in imperative phone / send / call + a telephone number (e.g.Please call 0800 for more information).In the corpus of Serbian adverts there is not one occurrence of molim ('please').4. Advertisers in English have a more responsible attitude towards potential buyers, since there are strict laws to be obeyed.ose regulations prohibit the use of unsupported and unsubstantiated claims, which can mislead customers about the features, quality or positive e ects of the advertised product.
In connection with the fourth di erence, it could be added that in Great Britain there is greater market competition amongst producers and a longer tradition of advertising.As a consequence, the average buyer is protected by the law, but is also more informed about their consumer rights.
In Serbia, at the time the original research on which much of this paper is based was nished (2005), there were still no consumer protection laws or strict regulations.However, nowadays, there is the law on advertising, but very few consumers feel protected by it.
Silaški concludes that the genre of advertisements has the same rhetorical structure with the easily recognized components regardless of the language, which re ects the global communicative intention of this genre.

Ideas for Future Research
As was exempli ed, many topics have been researched regarding advertisements in di erent cultures.Nowadays in the era of the internet, the focus has switched to the analysis of web advertisements (e.g.Ze and Aronson 1997;Armstrong 2001;Janoschka 2004).When compared with static print media, the web medium is rather speci c, with dynamic content and prone to instant changes, since no one can guarantee that the advert would be the same in a day or even less.e readership is larger, not always speci c and the information cannot be always re-read, unless saved beforehand. is poses the challenge to the researchers who over time observe the changes in web advertising.
In addition, it would be of great interest to see whether the linguistic patterns used and employed in other media have been transferred to the language of the web, whether globalization has in uenced the web discourse and to what extent.e innovations are due to a ect not only the language use, but also its users.
Furthermore, the future studies could focus on speci c web adverts, namely cosmetic products, cars, perfumes, bank services, insurance, package holiday tours etc. and possibly compare them in two cultures.Due to an apparent lack of such research on industrialized countries compared with countries in transition, the study should also be extended to include newly industrialized countries and to explore the linguistic / extra-linguistic methods of attracting future customers and buyers and di erent cultural assumptions and values.e research questions could address the following issues: (a) is globalized advertising expanding?(b) are lines of appeal, persuasion techniques and other linguistic methods broadly similar? and (c) how do communicative intentions tend to be realized in those cultures?

Conclusion
Advertisements are experienced as part of cultural communication and hence can reveal cultural values and norms of the target audience.When carefully analyzed, they can uncover any prevalent or recurring pattern as well as discover its possible meanings and messages.Cross-