BUSINESS ADVERTISING - APPEALS AS A MIRROR OF CULTURAL DIMENSIONS - ASTUDY OF 11 COUNTRIES

Across cultures, do systematic differences in advertising content mirr or predictable differences in the cultures themselves The authors desi gned a study to shed light on that question, using Hofstede's cultural model as a tool for analyzing cultures and using advertising appeals identified by Pollay. After coding advertisements in business publicat ions from 11 countries for the appeals employed, they computed correla tion coefficients relating the proportional use of each appeal and Hof stede's cultural dimensions: individualism, uncertainty avoidance, pow er distance, and masculinity. The culture-reflecting quality of advert ising was supported for 10 of 30 hypothesized relationships, and for a n additional eight after removal of outliers from the data.