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Culture is a predominant factor in advertising. Hence the key point of Coca-Cola’s advertising strategy is cultural strategy. Having browsed most of successful cola advertisings both at home and abroad, we may find that, the advertisings we watched in China are totally different from those on American channel. By using two different series of billboards and television advertisements, the Coca-Cola Company makes all their products popular both in Chinese market and American markets. Therefore, as the most recognizable brand in the world and the leader in pursuing advertising campaigns to flourish worldwide, Coca-Cola’s advertising strategies have aroused so many researchers’ interest from different domains of the society both at home and abroad. Advertising is closely associated with our cultural values. No doubt, advertisements themselves are manifestations of cultural values as well. As McLuhan (1964) stated that “…the ads of our time are the richest and faithful daily reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities”, the major function of advertising today is to transmit and reinforce cultural values.
There are already several studies have found that Chinese beverage ads tend to use the appeals such as “family” to highlight the value of collectivism; “affiliation” to stress public space; “status” to highlight high power distance. In contrast, American beverage ads are more likely to use “inpiduality” and “competition” to stress inpidualism; “freedom”, “security” to highlight personal space; “adventure” and “enjoyment” to express low uncertainty avoidance”. The purpose of this paper is conducted to illustrate the idea that advertising, as carrier of cultural values, have to adapt itself to cultural difference. This paper attempts to clarify that cultural difference can be reflected via beverage ads, particularly Coca-Cola’s advertising
Academically, this paper sums up and analyses the findings and outcomes of academic studies on Chinese and American cultural differences reflected in cola advertising. Hall and Hofstede’s value dimensions system have been frequently used as a conceptual framework of cultural differences in cross-cultural studies. In this paper, I will also use this mode to clarify the cultural differences in cola advertising in a systematically order.
In practice, with the process of economic internationalization, it is quite sure that the acceptance of advertising is disparate in different cultural areas. Generally speaking, adopting an international perspective in the advertising is often difficult and is usually not easy to overcome cultural barriers in cross-culture communication. Before we help Chinese beverage enterprise to developed their advertising strategy we should first understand what cultural differences are. Only by this can we help Chinese beverage enterprise export themselves to the world markets in a more effective way.
This paper is presented in five chapters. Chapter one, as the beginning of this paper, will give a general introduction of research backgrounds, purpose and significance of studying Coca-Cola’s advertising strategy as well as the organization of this paper. Chapter two mainly deals with the basic theoretical foundation related to Hall and Hofstede’s four value dimensions theory. The focus of the paper is laid on the following chapter. Chapter three compares and analyzes in detail the differences between Chinese and American culture reflected in the cola advertising. The last chapter, chapter four concludes all analysis, explores the existing problem in advertising and make suggestions for Chinese beverage enterprise.
2 Theoretical Foundations
Hofstede’s value dimensions theory have been frequently used as theoretical cornerstone of studying cultural differences in cross-cultural studies in many disciplines such as psychology, sociology, business, and communication. However, culture is rather a complicated concept, so it is impossible to cover each corner of this big concept. In the following part, I will mention some notions that may be adopted in this paper.