Do we want to see the whole picture? - A study of multicultural portrayals in advertising, extended effects and the cultural context

Sammanfattning: Over the last decades, globalization has driven demographic change in societies around the world. This shift demand marketers' attention in assessing the implications that may follow from a more ethnically diverse marketplace. However, the existing catalog of research is hampered by temporal distance and a limited concept of diversity, which warrants further investigation. The purpose of this study is to provide a deeper understanding of multicultural portrayals in advertising, by investing its traditional effects and potential societal effects as well as how these are affected by the cultural context. The study was conducted in a quantitative questionnaire-based experiment distributed to a sample representative of the Swedish population by the professional marketing research agency NEPA. The answers of 526 respondents were used for measuring traditional advertising effects, ad and brand attitude, as well as extended effects, empathy and social connectedness, in the context of different levels of cultural embeddedness and product involvement. The result shows that multicultural portrayals in advertising successfully can prime favorable ad and brand attitudes for lower involvement products, while such effects are lacking when higher involvement products are advertised. There is no support for the proposed positive priming for extended advertising effects, indicating that a representative sample of respondents will not necessarily exhibit positive priming. Furthermore, the study shows partial support for moderating effects of consumer attitude towards ethnic diversity on both the traditional as well as extended effects. Also, multicultural portrayal with high cultural embeddedness was found to prime respondents to be less empathetic.