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Content analysis in cross-

cultural advertising research:

insightful or superficial?

Dawn LermanFordham University

Michael CallowMorgan State University

Historically, cross-cultural researchers have used content analysis as their primary method

for comparing ads. Recently, however, content analysis has been criticised for being a

purely descriptive method that provides the researcher with little if any insight regarding

advertising effectiveness. To address this methodological limitation, we argue that

researchers should incorporate consumer interpretation into their cross-cultural

advertising studies. More specifically, we explicate a variation of content analysis that is

predicated on consumer interpretation of the advertising under study and test it against

the traditional content analytic approach. The results of our study and the implications for

future cross-cultural advertising research are discussed.

INTRODUCTION

Interest in cross-cultural advertising research has led to severalempirical studies that examine similarities and differences inadvertising content between various countries. It is generally assumed,rightly or wrongly, that advertisements reflect the target market’svalues and beliefs (Zhang & Gelb 1996). Researchers have thereforetried to predict the relative frequency of certain advertising appealsand techniques employed in two or more countries based on culturalstereotypes. For example, Biswas et al. (1992) found that French adstend to rely on sex appeal to a greater extent than American ads, whichis consistent with the perception that the French consumer is moresexually liberated and sensual than the American consumer.

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Cross-cultural studies of this kind typically use content analysis asthe primary method for comparing ads (Samiee & Jeong 1994).Content analysis is a technique used to classify text or objects intopredefined categories for the purposes of comparing basiccomponents (i.e. content) of that text or those objects (Krippendorff1980). Content analysis was originally devised to quantify qualitativedata through capture of the presence, or frequency, of a word orobject. In advertising, this would include the presence (or absence) ofa particular gender (Wiles et al. 1996), of black and white versus colourimages (Cutler & Javagli 1992), or of a visual portrayal of the product(Cutler & Javagli 1992). However, content analysis has also been usedin a cross-cultural context to capture more complex meanings such ashumour (Biswas et al. 1992) and emotions (Graham et al. 1993).

Despite its widespread usage, content analysis has been criticisedfor providing description without prescription (Samiee & Jeong 1994).That is, content analysis tells us what advertising is (i.e. ad content)rather than what it does (i.e. how it effects consumers and society),thus limiting the contribution of such research for both theory-building and marketing practice (Kover 2001). This limitation isreflected in the call for and shift towards incorporating consumerinterpretation in advertising research (McQuarrie & Mick 1999).Methods such as textual analysis, for example, recognise ‘denselyconvoluted webs of meaning’ (Stern 1996, p. 62) and the effects ofsuch meaning on consumers. Similarly, application of reader-responsetheory has helped to refocus the attention of advertising researchersto the response side (Scott 1994).

Obvious appeal notwithstanding, there is a dearth of cross-culturalresearch that focuses on the target audience’s interpretation of ads. Inthis paper, we argue for a shift towards consumer interpretations incross-cultural advertising research in order to uncover truly interestingand relevant insights that are useful for both academics andpractitioners. The paper begins with an exploration of embeddedmeaning in advertising and its associated methodological implications.We then explicate a variation of content analysis that is predicated onconsumer interpretation of the advertising under study (Lerman &Callow 1999) and test it against the traditional approach. The results ofour study and the implications for future cross-cultural advertisingresearch are discussed.

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MEANING IN ADVERTISING

The interpretation of ads requires more than just semanticunderstanding. The meaning of an ad is often found in metaphors thatare expressed by words and/or pictures (Cook 1992). According toFraser (1993, p. 332), a metaphor is ‘an instance of nonliteral languagein which the intended prepositional content must be determined bythe construction of an analogy’. In language, many idiomaticexpressions convey metaphors, as is the case with the expression ‘goesover your head’, which Americans and many other English speakerswould interpret as signifying ‘incomprehensible to you’ (Cook 1992).Such expressions can appear in ad copy or they can be suggested bythe visual elements of an ad. An example of the latter case appears inan ad for Ultra Bold laundry detergent showing money pouring downthe drain and in an ad for an insurance firm which shows a competitorliterally stealing the shirt from someone’s back (Cook 1992).

An understanding of metaphors such as those contained inadvertising can also benefit from Saussure’s view that linguistic signsare arbitrary. Cook (1992) exemplifies how this description of the signcan be extended to describe the metaphor ‘the heat is on’. In thisexample, ‘heat’ is the signifier (i.e. vehicle) and ‘difficulty’ is thecorresponding signified (i.e. concept). In Saussure’s semiology, theconnection between a signifier and a signified only holds because it isknown to hold by the people who use the system. As such, by makingappropriate choices and combinations, a person who knows thesystem encodes his or her thoughts into words and transmits them toanother person who is familiar with the same system. Rhetoricaltheory expresses it this way: a sender ‘crafts a message in anticipationof the audience’s probable response, using shared knowledge ofvarious vocabularies and conventions, as well as common experience’(Scott 1994, p. 252).

The common thread in the various approaches to language andmeaning is that metaphors are culturally determined (Fiumara 1995).In advertising, this is the case whether they are expressed through thead copy or through the visual elements of the ad (Scott 1994). Theimplication is that an ad appearing in one country may very well bemisinterpreted or meaningless in another, since the consumers fromthese countries do not operate within the same system and do notshare the same knowledge. This possibility has methodological

CONTENT ANALYSIS IN CROSS-CULTURAL ADVERTISING RESEARCH

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consequences in cross-cultural advertising research. It is to theseconsequences that we now turn.

CAPTURING MEANING IN ADVERTISING THROUGHCONTENT ANALYSIS

As suggested earlier, content analytic studies have become increasinglycomplex, particularly in the type of content they seek to capture.Although classification based on meaning poses a more challengingtask for the coder than does the traditional count, coders are likely toagree on such classifications if they share the knowledge required tointerpret the predetermined categories, extract meaning from ads, andrelate that meaning to the categories (Eco 1979). In a within-culture(i.e. one country) analysis, judges presumably share the language andcultural systems required for such agreement. Interjudge reliabilityshould therefore be high, provided that the researcher devised codingcategories with care and properly trained the judges (Kassarjian 1977).However, cross-cultural content analysis, by its very nature, requiresinterpretation of material created within two or more language and/orcultural systems. Thus interjudge reliability is not only a function ofthe coding scheme and judge training, but also of the judges’understanding of the relevant systems. Cross-cultural researchersoften address this issue by selecting bilingual judges.

BILINGUAL JUDGES

The methodological advantages of judge bilingualism are perhaps bestunderstood by considering the methodological limitations associatedwith monolingual judges. In using monolingual judges, the researchermust restrict the material coded by each judge to advertisements fromthe judge’s own country, assuming that ads from the other countriesare in a different language. It would also be questionable whether, say,American judges should code Australian or English ads, despitesharing a ‘common’ language. This means that in most cases thematerial from each country is content-analysed by a separate pair ofmonolingual judges and that there is no measure of interjudgereliability between the sets of judges.

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Suppose, for example, that American judges code ads from theUnited States and German judges code ads from Germany. Since theresearcher cannot calculate interjudge reliability between the Americanand German judges, s/he would not know whether they applied theset of categories in a consistent fashion. It would be unclear, then,whether the greater frequency of a given appeal, such as humour, inone country versus the other is due to any real difference between thetwo countries in advertising content or instead to systematicdifferences in how the German and American judges identifiedhumour. As a result, researchers who are concerned with the validityof their findings often use bilingual judges to content-analyse all adsfrom the two countries under study.

By using bilingual judges, researchers can determine whether aconsistent standard has been used to classify material from across theselected countries. One must be careful, however, when selecting‘bilinguals’ – especially when the codes are complex in nature – toensure that these judges are truly bilingual in a cultural as well as alinguistic sense. This might imply that the bilingual judge should havespent considerable time residing in both countries and that s/he isfamiliar with not only the literal elements of the language but also thenon-literal elements that are used to build analogies within eachculture. In other words, the bilingual judge should also be fluent in the‘silent language’ (Hall 1959).

BILINGUALISM AND THE CAPTURE OF MEANING

The use of bilingual judges to code material from the two countriesunder study enables the researcher to determine whether the codeshave been applied consistently to the ads from both countries. In otherwords, it allows the researcher to calculate an interjudge reliabilitymeasure within-country as well as across-countries. However,consistent application of a coding scheme does not guarantee validity,nor does it guarantee that this code is being used in a manner that isrelevant to the hypotheses under question. It also ‘in no way indicatesthat the codings reflect a popular or widespread interpretation of thetexts’ (Ahuvia 2001, p. 147). In fact, Ahuvia (2001) argues that forcingcoders to agree, as is done in content analysis, eliminates much of thecultural context within which consumers come to understand ads andthus reduces the relevance of the research.


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These issues suggest that the researcher should be concerned withselecting judges that are both bilingual and cultural translators.Unfortunately, cultural translators are not always readily available and,when they are, it is difficult to ascertain statistically whether or not thebilingual judges are indeed assigning codes across countries in aculturally relevant fashion. For instance, it would be difficult to knowwhether a German person who has lived in Spain for a lengthy periodof time and speaks Spanish fluently would necessarily think like aSpaniard when interpreting a Spanish ad. As a remedy, Lerman andCallow (1999) suggest developing narratives from native consumersfor each ad and then coding these culturally relevant narratives ratherthan the ads themselves.

AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH TO CROSS-CULTURALCONTENT ANALYSIS

The Lerman and Callow (1999) approach has subjects from the targetaudience (not the judges) interpret the messages themselves in theform of narrative texts. In other words, subjects from the Americantarget audience would interpret American ads and subjects from theSpanish target audience would interpret Spanish ads. Subjects wouldbe instructed to base their interpretations on a set of questionsestablished by the researcher. Obviously, the goals of the researchproject would determine the nature of the questions. At this stage,however, the subjects are not acting as judges of the material but areinstead being asked to provide a written account of their interpreta-tion. The purpose of this stage is to convert any implicit messages inthe material into explicit information.

Lerman and Callow recommend using at least three consumersubjects to interpret each ad in order to gauge the level of similaritiesin interpretation. This means that researchers can determine whethereach subject’s interpretation of an ad is idiosyncratic or in line withother members of the target audience. If, say, three subjects developednarrative texts for an ad and all three indicate that the ad is sexy, thenwe could assume that the ad in question has a strong sexual appeal. If,on the other hand, only one of the subjects finds the ad to be sexy,then the researcher would assume that this is a personal rather thancultural interpretation. This allows for greater variability in scores for

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each ad (if we were using three subjects, the range would be 3) thanthe binomial approach generally used in content analysis.

Once the cultural interpretation has taken place, judges can be usedto categorise the narratives. Since the material has been convertedfrom an advertising format comprising both visual and verbalelements into a more explicit textual narrative, the judges can rely onlanguage skills rather than interpretative skills to classify the material.Then, following completion of the coding, the researcher candetermine, through an interjudge reliability measure, whether thejudges have assigned the codes to the material from the two countriesin a consistent fashion.

Method

The traditional and narrative approaches to content analysis weretested in a study comparing ads from Spain and the United States.Narratives were collected from consumers within the target market forthe ads. One pair of bilingual judges coded these narratives andanother pair coded the ads directly.

Stimuli

Ten ads for hard liquor and ten ads for cars were selected from eachcountry. All ads appeared in either the American magazine GQ or theSpanish magazine Quo. These magazines were chosen based on thesimilarity of their content and the demographic profile of theirreadership. The hard liquor and car categories were chosen based onthe frequency with which ads appear for such products in GQ and Quoand the high level of interest in such categories among readers of thetwo publications.

Ten consumers in each country who fit the demographic profile ofthe magazine readership (male between the ages of 22 and 35) andthus are presumably in the target market for the ads served as adinterpreters and provided the narratives to be coded. Each consumerreceived a set of five ads from either GQ or Quo – depending upontheir country – along with five sheets – one for each ad – that askedthem the following questions:

• In your own words, please describe the ad.• Ignore what the advertiser may have intended and describe your

opinions and feelings about the ad.


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• What do you think the advertiser was trying to communicatewith the ad?

• How do you know what the advertiser was trying to communi-cate with this ad? What makes you think so?

These questions have been used as a framework by both Mick andPoliti (1989) and Phillips (1997) in examining consumer’s inferences asevoked by an ad’s message and thus provide a useful precedent forinterpreting the ads. The questions evoke both the descriptive and theinterpretative aspects of the ads and are, therefore, useful for elicitingboth strong and weak implicatures from consumers.

The ad interpretation process should have yielded 100 narratives tobe coded (10 ads/country × 2 countries × 5 consumers interpretingeach ad). However, one American consumer failed to complete thetask in its entirety, resulting in a total of 95 narratives.

Coding scheme

The coding scheme consisted of nine codes: traditional, modern,productivity, enjoyment, independence, status, affiliation, family andmorality. These codes represent a subset of values that Pollay (1983)identified as expressed in advertising and recommends for use as acoding scheme in advertising research. This subset was not intendedto be exhaustive, but rather to represent a range of values thatappeared in the ad stimuli. Since the interest here is in the coding itselfas opposed to the content of the coding, it was not necessary todevelop an exhaustive coding scheme as is typically recommended (seeKrippendorf 1980; Pollay 1983).

In applying the coding scheme, judges were instructed to makedecisions about each code separately so that the choice of one codewould not preclude them from assigning any other code. Thus, forexample, the presence of ‘traditional’ did not necessarily rule out thepresence of ‘modern’. Judges were also not required to assign a code ifnone seemed applicable. As a result, any particular ad or narrativecould be assigned anywhere from zero to nine codes. Judges were alsoinstructed to assign a code as present regardless of the degree towhich it is present in the ad or narrative. These instructions wereprovided in recognition that ads can contain both strong and weakimplicatures (Phillips 1997).

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Judge selection and training

All four judges fit the demographic profile of the magazine readership(i.e. male, between the ages of 22 and 35). Judges were assigned to oneof two coding tasks based on time available for the job (i.e. coding theads required fewer hours than did coding the narratives).

Judges were trained in pairs by one of the researchers and anassistant. Training sessions began with an overview of contentanalysis, judge responsibilities and the coding scheme. Judges werethen given sample ads or narratives, depending on the task to beperformed. The judges and trainers discussed the first two samples inorder to arrive at a coding decision for those samples. Once judgesconfirmed that they were comfortable with the coding scheme andprocedure, they coded the next three samples independently and thencompared their assigned codes. Disagreements were discussed andreconciled. This process was repeated with another five samples oruntil the judges felt ready to begin coding the final set.

Coding procedure

Each judge completed the coding task independently and then metwith his counterpart to compare assignments and reconcile disagree-ments. Disagreements were reconciled through discussion. On oneoccasion, the narrative judges could not reach agreement. In this case,the researchers heard the arguments posed by the two judges andmade a final decision.

RESULTS

Assessment of interjudge reliability

Interjudge reliability for the two sets of judges was assessed usingboth raw agreement rates and adjusted agreement rates (see Table 1).


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TABLE 1 INTERJUDGE RELIABILITY BY CODING APPROACH

Ads (%) Narratives (%)

Raw agreement 69.4 82.7

Cohen’s kappa 36.4 29.6

Perreault and Leigh’s I 62.3 80.9

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Narrative coding yielded a higher raw agreement rate than did adcoding. Moreover, only the narrative coders demonstrated reliability ator above the acceptable cut-off level of 0.80 (Kassarjian 1977). The adjudges and narrative judges exceeded chance agreement by 36.4% and29.6% respectively.

Following reconciliation, the ad judges reached 100% agreement.The narrative judges reached a post-reconciliation agreement rate of99.9%. 100% agreement was achieved following researcher inter-vention as described above.

Ad versus narrative coding

A chi-square analysis of codes (code presence or absence) by materialcoded (ads or narratives) was used. The analysis revealed statisticallysignificant differences in the coding generated by the two approaches(ads versus narrative) for six of the nine codes: Modern (χ2 < 0.005),Productivity (χ2 < 0.0001), Independence (χ2 < 0.005), Affiliation (χ2 <0.005), Family (χ2 < 0.01), and Morality (χ2 < 0.005) (see Table 2).

In each of these cases, the ad judges applied the codes morefrequently than did the narrative judges. Thus, in considering thedirection of the observed differences, it appears that the ad judgesmay have ‘read into’ the ads more deeply than did the consumers whowrote the narratives.

These statistically significant differences may or may not suggestthat ad coding and narrative coding resulted in different substantiveresults. The effect depends on the pattern of differences. Thus, chi-square analysis was used to determine the degree to which differences

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TABLE 2 CODE COMPARISON BY MATERIAL

Ads (frequency, %) Narratives (frequency, %)

Tradition 7, 35.0 20, 21.3

Modern** 15, 75.0 37, 39.4

Productivity*** 10, 50.0 12, 12.8

Enjoyment 10, 50.0 40, 42.6

Independence*** 8, 40.0 12, 12.8

Status 8, 40.0 29, 30.9

Affiliation** 8, 40.0 11, 11.6

Family* 4, 20.0 4, 4.2

Morality** 3, 15.0 1, 1.1

* χ2 < 0.01** χ2 < 0.005*** χ2 < 0.0001

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in ad and narrative coding would change the conclusions drawn aboutSpanish and American advertising. More specifically, two chi-squareanalyses were performed, one comparing countries and codes in thecase of ad coding and one comparing countries and codes in the caseof narrative coding (see Table 3).

These two analyses produced comparable results for Family (χ2 <0.05 for both ads and narratives). Furthermore, they indicate nodifference between Spanish and American advertising for Tradition,Productivity, Affiliation, Enjoyment and Morality. However, the approachesare inconsistent with regard to Independence (χ2 < 0.36 for ads,marginally significant at χ2 < 0.10 for narratives), Modern (χ2 < 0.01for ads, χ2 < 0.33 for narratives), and Status (marginally significant atχ2 < 0.10 for ads, χ2 < 0.25 for narratives). These differences indicatea lack of convergent validity, thus preventing any conclusions frombeing drawn regarding the relative presence of particular values inSpanish and American advertising.

DISCUSSION

The above study compared traditional content analysis against theLerman and Callow (1999) narrative variation. In this study, the twomethods did not yield the same results (see Table 4).


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TABLE 3 COMPARISON OF SUBSTANTIVE RESULTS BY CODING

MATERIAL

Ads Narratives

(frequency, %) (frequency, %)

Code Spain USA Spain USA

Tradition 5, 50.0 2, 20.0 11, 22.5 9, 20.0

Modern 5, 50.0 10, 100.0** 7, 34.7 20, 44.4

Productivity 6, 60.0 4, 40.0 5, 10.2 7, 15.6

Enjoyment 4, 40.0 6, 60.0*** 19, 38.8 21, 46.7

Independence 3, 30.0 5, 50.0 9, 18.4 3, 6.7***

Status 2, 20.0 6, 60.0*** 18, 36.0 11, 25.0

Affiliation 4, 40.0 4, 40.0 7, 14.0 4, 8.9

Family 4, 40.0 0, 0.0* 4, 8.0 0, 0.0*

Morality 2, 20.0 1, 10.0 1, 2.0 0, 0.0

* χ2 < 0.05** χ2 < 0.01*** χ2 < 0.10

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The ad coding identified differences between Spanish andAmerican advertising with respect to Modern, Status and Family,whereas the narrative coding identified differences with respect toIndependence and Family.

The question remains whether narrative coding is superior to adcoding as Lerman and Callow (1999) suggest. These differences raisethe question as to which is better as coding material, ads or narratives.From a reliability standpoint, narrative coding appears superior.However, the choice of narrative or ad coding should not depend onreliability alone. If the researcher, for example, seeks to compare theproportion of Asians in a set of ads from the United States andGermany, then narrative coding would be entirely unnecessary sincethe judge need only rely on explicit (visual) messages. However, if theresearcher is interested in determining the importance of minorities inthose ads, a cultural interpretation of the ads is required for codingjudgements (Wilkes & Valencia 1989). In this case, narrative codingmay be more appropriate. Similarly, narrative coding may be moreappropriate for identifying advertising themes or appeals. Anadvertiser may use the same ad or image (e.g. a well-dressed woman)across countries, but consumers in one country may differ in theirinterpretation of the ad theme (e.g. achievement) from those inanother country (e.g. taking care of oneself). Thus, managers may findthe results of narrative coding in cross-cultural studies particularlyuseful in revealing aspects of the underlying cultures.

As discussed, ad coding raises serious methodological concerns,particularly when the study in question seeks to uncover the culturalunderpinnings of advertising. Narrative coding appears to offer a

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TABLE 4 SUMMARY OF SUBSTANTIVE RESULTS

Ad Narrative

Tradition – –

Modern USA –

Productivity – –

Enjoyment – –

Independence – Spain

Status USA –

Affiliation – –

Family Spain Spain

Morality – –

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reliable alternative in this case. Of course, narrative coding has its ownlimitations, most notably that fewer ads can be coded with the sameresources, due to the practical requirements of recruiting subjects.Additionally, coding is limited to what informants can or are willing toexpress. Again, however, the high reliability for narrative coding offersresearchers greater flexibility in choosing judges with fewer concernsabout cultural biases than would be the case in ad coding.

It should be noted that the narrative approach differs significantlyfrom traditional content analytic studies since what is being content-analysed is the consumers’ interpretation(s) of an ad and not the aditself. However, the underlying motivation behind much of cross-cultural research in marketing is to identify cultural similarities anddifferences between groups of people. The narrative approachexplicitly recognises the possibility that an ad with seeminglystandardised content can be interpreted differently – be it by judges orconsumers – from one culture to another.

CONCLUSION AND DIRECTIONS FOR FURTHERRESEARCH

This paper examines the limitations of content analysis in cross-cultural advertising research and tests a variation on content analysisdesigned to overcome these limitations. Based on a comparison ofreliability measures and substantive results, it appears that narrativecoding is a superior approach to ad coding in cross-cultural advertisingresearch. These findings call into question the results of numerouscross-cultural studies. More specifically, they suggest that consumersmay not derive the same meaning as that reported by researchers. Ifsuch research is intended to influence cross-cultural advertisingresearch and practice, this is particular problematic because, as Ahuvia(2001, p. 152) points out, ‘texts only influence consumers throughconsumers’ understanding of the texts’. As such, researchers mightconsider returning to the ads used in prior cross-cultural contentanalytic studies, perform the two-step process required to generateand code texts, and compare the results to those originally obtained.Such comparisons would not only serve to validate the claims madehere regarding the differences between the traditional and narrativeapproaches to content analysis, but would also aid in the refinement ofspecific guidelines for applying the two-step narrative version. These


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studies, then, would provide an important step in overcoming themethodological problems which have so often been cited ashampering the development of and contribution made by cross-cultural marketing and consumer research (Malhotra et al. 1996, Sinet al. 1999).

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Dawn Lerman (Ph.D., Baruch College, City University of New York)is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Schools of Business atFordham University. Dr. Lerman’s research focuses on cross-culturaland language-related issues in consumer behavior, advertising andpricing. Her research has been published in a variety of academicjournals including the European Journal of Marketing, Journal ofAdvertising Research, the Journal of Product & Brand Management, andPsychology & Marketing.

Michael Callow (Ph.D., Baruch College, City University of NewYork) is an Assistant Professor of Marketing and InternationalBusiness in the Earl G. Graves School of Business & Management atMorgan State University. Dr. Callow’s research interests focus oncross-cultural issues relating to consumer behavior, advertising, andpricing. His work has been accepted at various refereed journals,including the European Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Product &Brand Management, the International Journal of Nonprofit & VoluntarySector Marketing, and the Journal of Euromarketing.


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