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