Many cross-cultural advertising studies in the last decade focus on matching the advertising messages to consumers’ self-concepts. Despite the cultural differences in self-concept, research on self-concept still has some limitations given the lack understanding of the dialectical thinking style. Dialectical thinking represents one’s perception of conflicted information. To develop the understanding of dialectical thinking in predicting the persuasiveness of advertising messages, this research uses arguments proposed in the literature and validates the importance of dialectical thinking in predicting advertising appeals’ persuasiveness for East Asian bicultural consumers. In addition to dialectical thinking, Benet-Martinez et al. (2002) proposed the concept of Bicultural Identity Integration (BII) to group biculturals into high Bicultural Identity Integration individuals and low Bicultural Identity Integration individuals. Lau-Gesk (2003)’s work claimed that Chinese Americans who perceive Chinese and American cultures are compatible (high Bicultural Identity Integration) tend to favour ads appeals that emphasizing on both cultural values. Whereas, those individuals who perceive the two cultures are contradicted and compartmentalised tend to favour ads appeals that emphasizing on only one cultural value. This research aims to examine the role of product type in moderating the relationship between Bicultural Identity Integration and the persuasiveness of dual-focused advertising appeals. Building upon marketing and psychology literature, the aim of this research is to extend our understanding of impacts of dialectical thinking and Bicultural Identity Integration (BII) on the persuasiveness of dual-focused advertising appeals. This research adopts both qualitative and quantitative techniques to examine the research questions. Firstly, 10 in-depth interviews with Chinese participants from The University of Manchester were conducted to understand the predictors of dialectical thinking. To examine the impacts of dialectical thinking and Bicultural Identity Integration on the persuasiveness of dual-focused advertising appeals, 161 participants were recruited in Experiment 1 and 164 participants were recruited in Experiment 2. The findings suggest that individuals’ perspective-taking and flexibility and openness capabilities tend to predict one’s degree of dialecticism. In Experiment 1, the results showed that dialectical thinking only explains the attitudinal differences among the immigration-based Chinese bicultural group when shared products were promoted. The differences in attitudes among high and low dialectical globalisation-based Chinese biculturals were not significant when either shared or personal products were promoted. Bicultural Identity Integration explains the attitudinal differences within both immigration-based and globalisation-based bicultural groups when shared products were promoted. Experiment 2 results suggested that language cues tend to have a priming effect on immigration-based Chinese biculturals’ degrees of dialecticism. They have shown higher degree of dialecticism when advertising appeals were written in Chinese and are less likely to favour dual-focused advertising appeals; participants also reported lower degree of dialecticism when advertising appeals were written in English and favour dual-focused advertising appeals. However, such priming effects were not significant within the globalisation-based Chinese bicultural group.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:689547 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Wang, Weisha |
| Contributors | Jackson, Paul ; Grimes, Anthony |
| Publisher | University of Manchester |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/advertising-to-bicultural-consumers-the-role-of-dialectical-thinking-and-bicultural-identity-integration-on-dualfocused-persuasive-appeals(8fba6fbf-d965-4207-bcde-330792870748).html |
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