A Functional Approach to Schwartz\u27s Cultural Dimensions: Persuasive Appeals Corresponding to Individual Cultural Values

The goal of this study is to add to the literature of advertising as well as consumer psychology, specifically testing whether people\u27s attitude towards online advertising would depend on how much the advertising resonated with their individual cultural values. Hereby, Schwartz\u27s cultural dimensions were adopted, namely Hierarchy, Egalitarianism, Embeddedness, Intellectual Autonomy and Affective Autonomy. Past research has suggested that when advertising contained the same value a person stresses, that person would have more favorable attitudes towards the ad. More relevantly, research has demonstrated that if an advertisement was more relevant with a person\u27s individual cultural values (Torelli et al., 2009), it would increase the favorability towards the ad. Using moving online banner ads, rather than still images, as advertising stimuli, this study tries to further investigate how advertising works on people. By exposing respondents to online banners embedding different cultural values, the study measured their attitudes towards the banners together with information on demographics and control variables. The results seemed not to support former studies that advertising containing the same value a person stresses received more favorabilit