COMPARATIVE ADVERTISING EFFECTIVENESS BETWEEN ENGLISH AND CHINESE LANGUAGE PRINT ADVERTISING

Abstract

In Singapore, advertisements produced by the multinational dominated advertising industry are conceived in "Western" minds. English language advertisements are translated into Chinese in attempts to reach the Chinese speaking audience. This is in spite of an obvious division between the Chinese among more Chinese speaking population and the English educated, thus more English speaking counterparts. The study attempts to compare the relative effectiveness of English language print advertising on the English speaking respondents to the Chinese language print advertising on the Chinese speaking sample. To narrow the wide range of print advertising, six attribute groupings were identified and the corresponding advertisements of the attributes tested on a number of agreement statements. The study involved two sets of general surveys in two languages to determine consumer perception of the selected print advertisements. Each pair of advertisement used for each attribute were similar on all accounts except for the language the advertisement is in. The sample size for this survey was 948 which was aimed to reflect a broad section of the Singaporean Chinese population. The results were tabulated using T-tests which were seen as the most suitable method of comparing a large number of statements. The findings revealed that while both the English and Chinese speaking respondents share a large number of similar methods of perceiving advertising, there exist a number of distinct differences between the two groups in their receptions of the same advertisement. The results indicate that the English speaking group was more easily swayed by image oriented, visual led advertising while the Chinese speaking had strong preferences for informative, traditional approach to advertisements. It was also found that the Chinese speaking group was more sensitive to price information and that rational value-for-money judgement works better with this group in particular. The implication to marketers of the results is that the market segmentation of the Singaporean Chinese can be more finely tuned to improve understanding of the marketplace. In terms of the advertising process, advertising agencies may need to distribute emphasis to include Eastern approaches in creating advertising.