Global Advertising Standardization in Japan and the United States: a Closer Examination of High-Involvement Products.

The question of whether to standardize or adapt advertising internationally remains a matter of great importance to researchers and practitioners. While studies have compared the use of standardization between high-involvement and low-involvement categories, research within either of these categories is limited. In general, researchers have concluded that high-involvement products generally have more standardized advertisements than low-involvement products. This paper compares the standardization levels between different high-involvement product categories. We examine high-cognition and low-cognition high-involvement products. The research questions are examined via content analysis of print advertisements of highly circulated American and Japanese magazines using a framework developed by Harris and Attour (2003). A modified coding scheme was developed for advertisements that contained no text. Results indicate that ads for low-cognition high-involvement products are more likely to be standardized across these two cultures than ads for high-cognition high-involvement products. Second, prior research has suggested that television advertising is more likely to be standardized than print advertising, but little is known about what type of print advertising is more likely to be standardized. We find that picture ads are more likely to be standardized than ads containing text.

Citation:

Melina Young and Eugene Sivadas (2009) ,"Global Advertising Standardization in Japan and the United States: a Closer Examination of High-Involvement Products.", in AP - Asia-Pacific Advances in Consumer Research Volume 8, eds. Sridhar Samu, Rajiv Vaidyanathan, and Dipankar Chakravarti, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 382-383.