The Influence of Ad Design and Content on Purchase Intentions of Low and High Context Cultures

Purpose:Empirical evidence is supportive of the influence of lowcontext (LC) and high context(HC) cultures on advertising design and execution (focused on text or context) and the content of the appeal (what utilities are highlightened). Specifically,functional, and socially conspicuous content appeals that stress those utilities are suggested to be more effective in LC cultures while emotional appeals in HC cultures. While the text focused ads are suggested to be more effective in LC cultures, where context focused ads in HC cultures. The objective of this research is to examine the effect of ad content and context in different cultures. This will clarify whetherdifferent marketing adaptation in content and context of the message is required for each culture. Methodology:Data were collected using an online experiment in two cultures considering LC and HC cultures (N of LC culture=97; N of HC culture=111) for two different product categories, cars and refrigerators. Findings:Some claims are consistently better with text or structure, beyond the HC and LC cultures, hedonic claim is better with the ad's structure than the text for both LC and HC in the car category and functional claim is better with the text than the structure for both categories. social claim yielded Higher PI (Purchase Intention) from HC and LC cultures in both categories and the functional claim in the refrigerator category yield higher PI in LC than HC. Unexpectedly, the text claims were rated higher for HC than LC in the car category. Especially the social claim focusing on text yield higher PI from HC individuals. Practical implications:Stereotypical cultural targeting is examined if it is justified when trying to encourage products purchase intention. Finding suggest that adapting the message or the context of the ad to the culture might be necessary to increase purchase intention, the practical suggestions should be designed based on the category examined. For technical products it seems text is more preferred among HC participants. While functional content was the most preferred for both cultures. Originality:This is the first study that examines cultural differences in the interactive effect of two crucial elements of the ad on purchase intention. This examination is important both theoretically (are different cultures are different in this context?) and practically (knowing if and what changes are needed when creating ads for each culture)