Vietnamese culture reflection through advertising: case study of milk advertisements on television commercials

Abstract

There are a various of elements that contributing to the success of a business. These factors can be effectively listed through the rule "Four Ps" of marketing which were originally proposed by E. Jerome McCarthy, a marketer, back in 1960. The Four Ps are: product, price, place and promotion. When these elements are efficiently followed and well-aligned they can lead to business success. In the world of technology, promotion can be considered as a bridge making customer have a chance to experience the feeling in the products. Or it can be said that it is an impersonal presentation where a standard or common message regarding the merits, price and availability of product or service is given by the producer or marketer. The advertisement builds pull effect as advertising tries to pull the product by directly appealing to customer to buy it. However, the globalization nowadays requires advertisers not only updating and improving product’s quality but also understanding the culture values of their target customers. Thousand of companies have failed in local market when forgetting these factors in most of their advertisements. Although this made a lesson for the followers, actually it is not easy to learn and adapt in an automatically way. It requires not only advertisers but only sellers with a culture experience process. To deal with a part of this issue, this research is conducted to survey customer’s preferences on culture reflection through a particular advertising media: TVCs. Different from prior studies which research on the correlation between advertising and culture, this research take a look of view of milk product in Vietnam market by combining the theory of cultural dimensions of Hofstede (1980) and list of advertising appeals by Pollay (1983). The result shows the 2 lines of opinion on consumer preference on the reflection of culture through TVCs. People tend to like cultural dimensions have higher score relating to Vietnamese characteristics. However, some of the limitation in this study can be listed is that each appeal in the large cultural dimension has no much gapvi difference with the others. Hence, for advertisers in the future, to maximize profit, they need to exploit as much as possible these or they should make the combination between some dominant app