A preview of the
Journal of Advertising Research

September 2014 (Vol. 54, Issue 3)

What We Know about Multicultural Marketing

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Letter from the CEO
Leading the Way to Drive Growth and Change
The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) is on a mission drive growth and change, prompting the industry to develop new metrics and boost ROI collaboratively, writes President and CEO, Gayle Fuguitt. As part of that mission: the opportunity for the Journal of Advertising Research “to inspire ‘bleeding-edge’ solutions.”

Editor’s Letter
What Do We Know about Multicultural Marketing?
Startling shifts in demographics challenge advertisers’ efforts to reach a multicultural marketplace, Editor-in-Chief, Geoffrey Precourt notes in his summary of this issue’s feature-theme articles. Precourt also welcomes Starcom MediaVest Group’s Esther (E. T.) Franklin to the Speaker’s Box column.

Numbers, Please
Is Your Digital Marketing Strategy in Sync with Latino-User Behavior?
A Growing Demographic Forces Media Firms to Rethink Mobile-Marketing Strategies
A surge in the U.S. Hispanic population is a wake-up call to identify and strengthen strategies for targeting this important demographic segment. comScore’s Gian Fulgoni and Adam Lella offer strategic considerations for marketers.

Speaker’s Box
Are You Reaching the Black-American Consumer?
How the Rise of U.S. Multiculturalism Ended Up Sending Mixed Marketing Messages
Esther (E. T.) Franklin (Starcom MediaVest Group) argues that too much of what we see in marketing—while tolerant and inclusive toward Black-Americans—is neither entrenched nor rooted in their experiences or cultural insights. “The messages they receive from brands often do not reflect their lives and have little connection with how they spend their hard-earned $1.03 trillion (and growing) buying power,” Franklin notes.

Research Quality
The Impact of Digital Fingerprinting and Identity Verification on Data Quality:
Duplication Detection Is Not a Perfect Science
Melanie Courtright and Kartik Pashupati of Research Now investigate the effectiveness of machine identification—i.e. digital fingerprinting—as a tool for removing duplicate respondents in surveys. Their work is the latest chapter of the ARF’s Foundations of Quality 2 initiative to improve data quality.

ARF Ogilvy Awards 2014
A 20-Year Tradition: Marketing Art Meets Marketing Science:
Best-in-Show Winners of the ARF’s 2014 David Ogilvy Awards
The top recipients of the Ogilvy awards reveal their winning campaign strategies: ConAgra Foods (Grand Ogilvy Award), Hewlett-Packard Co. (Business Challenges), The Coca-Cola Company (Cross-Cultural), and Art.com (Cross-Platform).

 

Features

A Model for Delivering Branding Value through High-Impact Digital Advertising:
How High-Impact Digital Media Created a Stronger Connection to Kellogg’s Special K®
High-impact digital advertisements, with their large real estate and engaging features, are well known for driving consumer response rates higher than those of standard display formats. But how do these large formats affect branding values? In this study, Kellogg Company and research partners, Undertone and Ipsos ASI, test a method for quantifying the effectiveness of these large digital formats on branding recognition for its Special K® cereal, with winning results. Shawn D. Baron (Undertone/Facebook), Caryn Brouwer (Ipsos ASI), and Amaya Garbayo (Kellogg Company).

Why Do We Share? The Impact of Viral Videos Dramatized to Sell:
How Microfilm Advertising Works
In this peer-to-peer marketing study from Taiwan, Tsai Chen (Fo Guang University) and Hsiang-Ming Lee (Chien Hsin University of Science and Technology) analyze the format and the persuasive effects of the minifilm, or microfilm advertising (MFA), typically a short streaming advertisement designed to go viral. MFA has become particularly popular among product and service advertisers in China and Taiwan, the authors report.

Why the Marketer’s View Matters as Much as the Message:
Speaking Down to the Consumer Speaks Badly to a Brand’s Image
Does an advertisement insult consumers by underestimating their intelligence? And, in doing so, does it negatively affect consumer perceptions’ of the brand? Micael Dahlén and Sara Rosengren (Stockholm School of Economics), and Edith Smit (Amsterdam School of Communication Research) test their hypotheses across two different studies and three different product categories.

Measuring the Strength of Color Brand-Name Links:
The Comparative Efficacy of Measurement Approaches
Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and JAR co-executive editor, and Magda Nenycz-Thiel of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, offer a theoretically and empirically validated approach to measuring the strength of color as a brand-identity element. The authors compare four measurement approaches, testing 880 consumers across three categories: banking, chocolate, and hair care.

What We Know About Multicultural Marketing

“Enculturated” Pleasure: A Study in Multicultural Engagement
How Do Mexican and U.S. Consumers Respond to Humorous Advertising Differently?
People’s personal humor styles are not always the same when encountering humorous advertisements. That’s not so surprising—but the complexities behind these differences make this a fascinating study. “For example, compared to U.S. consumers, Mexican consumers less likely would use the self-enhancing humor style in person, but advertising characters with this humor style elicit positive attitudes toward the advertisement,” note the authors, Valerie L. Wang (Ohio University), Kevin W. Cruthirds University of Texas at Brownsville), Yong J. Wang Ohio University), and Jie Wei (National University of Singapore).

Do Korean-Americans View Drug Advertisements Differently than Non-Hispanic White Americans?
Perceptions of Direct-to-Consumer Media: How Useful Is the Information They Convey?
The Korean-American market segment is distinct, economically powerful, and under-examined. This observation prompted authors Jisu Huh (University of Minnesota), Denise E. DeLorme (University of Central Florida), Leonard N. Reid (University of Georgia), and Junga Kim (University of North Florida) to compare perceived information utility of six direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) media for prescription drugs among Korean-Americans and Non-Hispanic White Americans. Drug-brand Web sites, followed by television, were the most useful platforms. Moreover, the authors found, “ethnically tailored messages and media plans incorporating ethnic-language media would improve DTCA effectiveness for Korean-Americans and other U.S. immigrant populations.”

The Power of Cultural Factors in Spanish-Language Advertising:
Ethnic-Group Traits and Metrics May Predict Advertiser Investment across Media Platforms
Amy Jo Coffey of the University of Florida replicates her 2008 study on television advertisers, expanding her investigation across media platforms to identify which audience and market factors are valued most by advertisers. Her observations may help predict the likelihood of investment in ethnically focused advertising.

The Effect of Generational Status in Language-Tailored Political Messages:
Why Advertising Needs to Adjust to Appeal to Young-Adult Latino-Americans
Young Hispanic-Americans represent a startling 25 percent of the country’s millennials. Authors Sindy Chapa (Florida State University) and Enrique P. Becerra (Texas State University) use this and other U.S. Census data about Hispanic-Americans—the nation’s fastest growing ethnic group—to dig deeper into the changing nature of the North American marketplace. Their study reveals that far from being a homogenous demographic bloc, there are variations in which young-adult Latinos present a kind of marketing challenge different from what their progenitors offer. Chapa and Becerra focus on political advertising to see how responses vary across five generations of Latinos.