Cultural Adoption Through Advertisements: International and Indian Scenarios

Abstract

Advertising has always been used as a mass media tool to reach out to heterogeneous consumers with their varied choices. Cross-cultural advertising research on the other hand includes the branch of advertising research that explores the issues or contents related to advertisements across cultures. When it comes to cultural depiction through advertisements, most of the advertisements take refuge in the celebration that signifies and glories the culture to a mass number of people. The study has taken audio-video commercials from several brands from both international and Indian perspectives to understand the cultural depiction that has been portrayed through the ad content. Those commercials were also been screened during focus group discussions to understand the perception of the viewers on the cultural differences displayed through the advertisements from the same brands but with different cultural perspectives. The understanding of culture for people turned out to be highlighting three major key areas ‘belief’, ‘passed on for generation’, and ‘action’ that represents culture. The participants of focused group discussions also suggest factors like ‘the depiction is less realistic’, ‘less practical’, ‘missing essence’ etc., while incorporating these could finally mend the gap between the expectation from the audience and portrayals of the message through advertisement