A cross-national study of attitudes toward advertising in Tanzania and the United States: A functional perspective

This cross-national study investigates attitudes toward advertising in Tanzania, a collectivistic country, and the U.S., an individualistic country. Two sets of samples were compared on the content and valences of their top-of-mind thoughts and on their responses to a list of common advertising beliefs and attributes. The thought-listing technique was assessed for correspondence with a semantic differential scale measuring attitudes toward advertising in general, in both countries. A cultural scale was used to assign people into either an allocentric or idiocentric category to enable pan-cultural and within-country comparisons to be made. Advertising attitudes were hypothesized as being constituted of three dimensions based on attitude functions labeled as utilitarian, social identity, and ego-defensive. The American respondents wrote a slightly greater number of thoughts compared to Tanzanian respondents, but their attitudes toward advertising were generally more critical. Thoughts related to advertising\u27s entertainment value, deceptive practices, and provision of product information were highly salient for the American samples, while advertising\u27s provision of product information, role in stimulating business competition, and corruption of cultural values, were the most salient for the Tanzanian samples. The Tanzanians wrote a greater proportion of utilitarian thoughts compared to the Americans, but respondents from both countries wrote an approximately equal proportion of ego-defensive thoughts. Americans generally tended to articulate their thoughts more distinctly and directly, and expressed a greater diversity of attributes, consonant with their greater experience with advertising. The thought-listing technique correlated highly with the semantic differential scales for the U.S. samples, but did not do so for the Tanzanian samples. No differences were found between allocentrics and idiocentrics in their responses to beliefs about advertising or in their attitudes toward advertising. However, country differences were found. The hypothesized three-dimensional structure of attitudes toward advertising was found to conform quite well to the attitude structures of three out of the four samples. It did not do so for the U.S. student sample