Conducting Research on International Advertising: The Roles of Cultural Knowledge and International Research Teams

ABSTRACT

International research teams that are knowledgeable about the cultures under investigation are considered a prerequisite for sound research. By virtue of a meta-analytic review, this study empirically compared international and national research teams that have conducted experiments on the effectiveness of cultural value adaptation in advertising. Results show that, although the composition of research teams does not make for dependable differences in the outcomes of these experiments, international research teams may be more capable than national teams in designing pairs of culturally adapted–versus–unadapted advertisements. It may not matter much, however, whether the international team includes a representative of the audience's culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Advertising
• culture
• international teams
• meta-analysis
• value appeals

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by a grant from the Niels Stensen Foundation (the Netherlands) awarded to the first author.

Notes

1. It could be argued that nationality is not the only indicator of an author's match or mismatch with a culture that is studied. Extended residence in the culture under investigation is likely to be sufficient to permit researchers to be able to design culturally adapted messages. Therefore, if the nationality of all authors of a given experiment mismatched the culture under investigation, it was determined if at least one of the authors has been in residence in that culture for at least 10 years. In only one case, this residence altered the original coding. “Agrawal & Maheswaran (2005) study 2” was first coded as “no match” (both authors were born and raised in India, but the participants are from the United States). With the criterion of extended residence, this case was coded as “match” as Maheswaran has been in the United States for more than 10 years. In a new analysis, when the authors’ cultural background matched that of the audience, adapted appeals were significantly more persuasive than unadapted appeals (r= .081, p= .016). There was no such adaptation effect when there was no audience–author cultural match (r= .041, p= .128), despite excellent statistical power (.95). The difference between these two mean effect sizes was not significant; Q(1) = 0.8, p= .357.

2. References marked with an asterisk indicate studies included in the meta-analysis.