Paws in Advertisements Cross cultural reactions

Globalization has caused Western advertising to be spread all over the world. Some companies and advertisers however have not paid sufficient attention to how different cultures perceive different cues. Animals for example are perceived differently in different cultures and previous research as well as evidence from past advertisements have proven that using animals in advertising might work in some countries but not all over the world. This research explores dogs in advertising and how different culture groups perceive brands that include dogs in their advertisements. The research question states; How do international attitudes toward dogs impact perception of brands that use dogs in advertising? This was a quantitative research that required an experimental approach to answer the main research question. Participants from four different nationalities were asked to answer a survey with one of two conditions. One survey had questions about an advertisement with a dog and one survey had questions about an advertisement without a dog. These two conditions were tested in a 2 X 4 factorial design to discover if there was a significant interaction effect between the two conditions and four nationalities including American, Antillean, Dutch and Moroccan, this acted as the moderator variable. The dependent variables included advertisement likeability, brand likeability and Purchase intent. The results showed that the interaction effect was only significant for purchase intent, but further investigation showed that the differences in means were only significant for the control group. Therefore, all the hypotheses were rejected. However, further investigation did show that although participants may have gotten a positive feeling from the advertisement with a dog, the Moroccan and Antillean culture groups scored much lower means when it 3 came to likeability of the dog in the advertisement leading to the conclusion that the impact of the dog in the advertisement is less major then hypothesized, but there is an impact.