This article, through content analysing a total of 572 Chinese magazine advertisements from 1982 and 1992, identifies ‘modernity’, ‘technology’ and ‘quality’ as three predominant cultural values manifest in Chinese advertising over the past ten years. Although advertisements for imported products were found to be the pace-setter for these three dominant values, their ‘leadership’ is being challenged by advertisements for joint venture products.This study also gauges the value changes in Chinese advertising. Results indicate that while the values less frequently used in 1992 advertisements are utilitarian in nature and centring around product quality, the values increasing in their occurrences are more symbolic and suggestive of human emotions. The group of symbolic values consists of those from eastern as well as western culture.

Reflections of Cultural Values: A Content Analysis of Chinese Magazine Advertisements From 1982 and 1992

The authors analyzed commercials (N = 496) shown on 3 Chinese TV stations in the summer of 2000 to uncover the dominant value themes and identified 13 value themes as applicable in the current sample. This study found that the most dominant value themes in the Chinese commercials were product quality/effectiveness, family, modernity, beauty/youth, and pleasure indicating the prevalence of utilitarian values and the coexistence of both traditional and modern values in the world of Chinese advertising. Value themes identified in this study are compared with previous conceptualizations and discussed in the context of globalization and Chinese cultural change.

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Modernization and Tradition in an Age of Globalization: Cultural Values in Chinese Television Commercials

This study examines how environmental claim type may affect the communication effectiveness of environmental advertising, and how the source country's green image may moderate the claim type-effectiveness relationship. By applying a 4 × 2 factorial research design to investigate 800 subjects in Guangzhou, China, the study demonstrates that environmental claim type and the source country's green image both exert a significant main effect on the effectiveness. This study also demonstrates that these two factors in combination exhibit a significant interaction effect on the effectiveness. These empirical findings remind marketers of the importance of adopting a situational perspective when designing their environmental claims. When deciding which environmental claim type they should apply, marketers should, among others, also take into consideration how their target customers actually perceive the eco-friendliness of the relevant source country. Given consumers' increasing scepticism about products with alle...

The effectiveness of environmental advertising: the role of claim type and the source country green image

Advertising, propaganda, and value change in economic development: The new cultural revolution in China and attitudes toward advertising

Issues in the Economics of Advertising.

During the 1980s, bracketed by the Third Plenum in 1978 and the suppression of the democracy movement in 1989, China edged, step by step, away from the orthodoxies of the Cultural Revolution, and each reversal excited a certain amount of commentary both within and without China. As time passed, and the list of reintroduced institutions and practices grew ever longer, habituation reduced the surprise of succeeding announcements. But the reintroduction of advertising, a cental totem of advanced capitalist culture, occupied a particularly significant place on the list because its reappearance in China forced the Chinese to reconsider distinctions that had formerly been drawn between capitalist and socialist societies. For most of its history, the People's Republic had castigated advertising as the apotheosis of the capitalist religion of consumption. This was especially so in the late 1960s during the height of the Cultural Revolution. Afterwards few commercial billboards or newspaper advertisements interrupted the skein of relentlessly political messages that crossed public space. When advertising was officially reintroduced in 1979, and its sanctioned scope expanded beyond industrial goods, the state faced a daunting ideological task: rebuilding a case for advertising in a socialist system that had long defined itself as one that did not need commercial exhortation. In essence, it had to sell the legitimacy of selling.

Randall Stross

Papers

The Return of Advertising in China: A Survey of the Ideological Reversal