The Differential Interaction of Auditory and Visual Advertising Elements with Chinese and English

Abstract

Multimedia advertisements often contain nonverbal auditory elements, such as music and sound effects, and nonverbal visual elements, such as images and logos. On the one hand, these elements can have the unintended negative effect of interfering with the processing of the verbal ad copy. Two experiments demonstrate that auditory elements interfere more with the learning of and cognitive responding to English ad copy than with Chinese ad copy, and vice versa for visual elements. On the other hand, auditory and visual elements have the intended positive effect of facilitating ad copy recall when they are reinstated as part of an integrated marketing campaign or as a recall cue in an advertising tracking study. A third experiment demonstrates that auditory elements are better retrieval cues for English than for Chinese ad copy, and vice versa for visual elements. The authors discuss implications of these cross-linguistic differences for the effective design of multimedia communications, integrated marketing campaigns, advertising tracking studies, and cross-cultural research.

That Sounds Sweet: Using Cross‐Modal Correspondences to Communicate Gustatory Attributes

“…Past research has found non-verbal auditory cues to interfere more with message processing when paired with English rather than Chinese advertisement messages-likely due to the fact that alphabetical languages rely more on auditory processing and the subvocalizing of words, while logographic languages depends more on visual processing (Tavassoli & Lee, 2003). Given that music has been shown to carry semantic meaning (Koelsch, et al, 2004), a possibility is that this interference effect of music on alphabetical language processing will be reduced if the meaning of the music is congruent with the focal advertisement message (i.e., the taste of the advertised product).…”

“…Previous research has, for example, investigated the role of visual factors (An, 2007;Zhou, Zhou, & Xue, 2005) and music (Murray & Murray, 1996;Tavassoli & Lee, 2003) in advertising across different cultures. While prior studies focused on musical surface features (e.g., genre or the meaning of lyrics; Murray & Murray, 1996; presence vs. absence of music; Tavassoli & Lee, 2003), the present study extends this line of research by investigating how meaning that is encoded in the very musical structure is differentially perceived across cultures. Our findings may also have implications for the processing of advertising messages:…”

The significance of trust and renqing in the long-term orientation of Chinese business-to-business relationships

“…Over the last two decades an emerging stream of research has emerged that has provided somewhat qualitative overviews of China (Garten, 1998;Kao, 1993;Lieberthal & Lieberthal, 2003;Vanhonacker, 1997), Chinese buying behavior (Ackerman & Tellis, 2001;Graham & Lam, 2003;Klein, Ettenson, & Morris, 1998;Sun, Chen, Fang, & Liang, 2000;Tavassoli & Lee, 2003;Zhou & Nakamoto, 2001), and the fundamentals of business and marketing compared with Western practices (Atuahene-Gima & Li, 2002;Fang, Palmatier, & Evans, 2004;Song, Xie, & Dyer, 2000;Yan, 1998;Zeng & Williamson, 2003).…”

An International Perspective of Online Disclosure Presentation: A Comparison of Banner Ad Disclosures from United States, United Kingdom, and Singapore Web Sites

“…In their discussion of television advertising disclosures, Hoy and Andrews (2004) note that Tavassoli and Lee's (2003) finding that processing differences for alphabetic (e.g., English) versus logographic (e.g., Asian) languages has implications for disclosures. Specifically they noted that Tavassoli and Lee (2003) found that, with English speakers, audio distractions interfered more with learning and retrieving advertising text compared to visual distraction.…”

“…Specifically they noted that Tavassoli and Lee (2003) found that, with English speakers, audio distractions interfered more with learning and retrieving advertising text compared to visual distraction. The opposite effect was found for Chinese speakers where visual distraction was a hindrance.…”