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Abstract
This article aims to research how global and local
brands managed their image according to traditions and
values shared by Romanian target during the Christmas
Holiday, a special time for everyone all over the world.
Our research focuses on TV ads broadcast (40 spots) in
Romania in December 2010, namely winter campaigns
developed before Christmas and dedicated to the
Christmas spirit. The questions we will answer in the fol-
lowing study regard some important aspects such as:
which product categories and brands use this special time
of the year to get closer to the consumers’ life, which val-
ues are promoted by these brands, which characters and
heroes of the commercials better express these values,
which Christmas symbols are emphasized and what is the
balance between global and local features in these cam-
paigns. We are interested to see how brands mark out this
special time of year, according to two important criteria:
their strategic global values, on the one hand, and the
consumers’ insight strongly influenced by tradition and
local events, on the other hand.
The research method applied here is the content analysis.
We defined it based on previous values (product categories,
brands, values, symbols, advertising heroes) as quan titative
terms, and on the relationship between global and local
features in the chosen campaigns, as qualitative terms.
The main hypothesis of this research is based on the
relationship between two important terms, globalization
and glocalization, their influence reflects how global and
local features interweave in order to adapt both to the cus-
tomer’s needs and to the evolution of the market. What we
are trying to demonstrate in the following study is that
hybridization has become the only way to appeal to con-
sumers as local target, because they do not have to give up
their cultural values, but they need to internalize the global
ones. Even if Romanian advertising market is a young
one, it grows in a way that seems to rapidly recover the
gap between the global and the local, sometimes by
importing external models or by blending them with spe-
cific values. Nowadays, the border between these influ-
ences and genuine pattern tend to be more and more dif-
fuse, thanks to the market evolution.
Key words
Glocalization, advertising, consume culture,
Christmas time, tradition.
Zusammenfassung
Das Ziel dieses Berichtes besteht darin die Art und
Weise zu untersuchen in der die Welt-und Lokalmarken ihr
Image verwalten in Bezug auf die Traditionen und Werte,
die während des Weihnachtsfestes, einer sonst überall auf
der Welt als vornehm angesehene Zeit, auf dem rumäni-
schen Markt gepflegt werden. Das vorliegende Studium
konzentriert sich auf Fernsehwerbungen (insgesamt 40)
die im Monat Dezember 2010 in Rumänien gesendet wur-
den, genauer gesagt die Winterkampagnen um
Weihnachten und in dessen Geist. Die Fragen die wir im
vorliegenden Studium beantworten möchten, zielen auf
manche wichtige Aspekte: die Produkt- und
Markenkategorien die dieses Intervall auswerten um dem
Verbraucher näherzukommen, die Werte die von diesen
gefördert werden, die Spothelden die bestens diese Werte
zum Ausdruck bringen, die Weihnachtssymbole die her-
vorgehoben werden und das Verhältnis zwischen den glo-
balen und lokalen Zügen in diesen Kampagnen. Wir sind
daran interessiert herauszufinden wie diese Marken
diese spezielle Jahreszeit unterstreichen, indem wir auf
zwei Kriterien Bezug nehmen: einerseits ihre globale stra-
tegische Werte und andererseits, der Einblick des von den
lokalen Traditionen und Ereignissen tief beeindruckten
Verbrauchers.
Die benutzte Untersuchungsmethode ist eine
Inhaltsanalyse, welche anfänglich mengenmäßig in
Funktion von den vorher erwähnten Variablen (Produkt-
und Markenkategorien, Werte, Symbole, Spothelden) und
nachher, qualitätsmäßig durch die Erstellung der
Zusammenhänge zwischen lokal und global angesprochen
wird.
Die dabei angesprochene grundlegende Voraussetzung
stützt sich auf das Verhältnis zwischen zwei wichtigen
Begriffen, nämlich der Globalisierung und der
Glokalisierung, deren Einfluss die Art und Weise in der
die globalen und lokalen Züge sich ineinander verflech-
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Global and Local Features in Romanian Commercialsbroadcast at Christmas Time Mãdãlina MORARU (BUGA), University of Bucharest, Romania
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ten, um sich an die Bedürfnisse der Verbraucher und der
Marktentwicklung anzupassen, wiederspiegelt. Im nach-
folgenden möchten wir den Beweis erbringen, dass die
Hybridisierung die einzige Möglichkeit der Sensi bi -
lisierung der Verbraucher auf dem Lokalmarkt geworden
ist, da diese nicht auf ihre eigene kulturellen Werte ver-
zichten, aber sich die globalen aneignen müssen. Obwohl
der rumänische Werbemarkt noch jung ist, hat dessen
Entwicklung eine rasche Einholung des Unterschiedes
zwischen Global und Lokal bewirkt, einerseits durch die
Einfuhr fremder Modelle, andererseits durch deren
Vermengung mit den einheimischen Werten. Heuer zeich-
nen sich die Grenzen zwischen globalen Einflüssen und
lokalen Mustern immer diffuser ab, eine Tatsache die von
der Marktentwicklung angezeigt wird.
Kernwörter
Glokalisierung, Werbung, Konsumkultur, Weihnachten,
Tradition.
Introduction
Christmas time meaning grew richer along with the
competition between European St. Nicholas and
American Santa Claus, when Coca-Cola decided to asso-
ciate its image with this celebration, during the campaign
created by Haddon Sundblom in 1931. Even if Christmas
cards were sold everywhere and customers flooded mar-
kets all around, Santa was the authentic symbol of happi-
ness and hope that gave a special aura not only to the
drink, but to the entire American culture for ever. Karal
Ann Marling believes that Santa was a sign of a new era
of celebrations in America: “In fact, Santa in general
underwent a major revival in the 1930s, offering reassur-
ance in the dark night just before the dawn of Christmas
day.” (2001: 215) This was the real moment when the
American Christmas was initially connected only to a
brand, but soon spread over all around the world by inter-
weaving with other cultural and religious customs. What
was the fact that helps so much to share the same values
on the markets at Christmas time? To answer this ques-
tion, we should go deeply inside the concepts of globaliza-
tion and glocalization which broadly explain Santa’s dis-
semination.
Before we scientifically approach these terms, it is
essential to point out, that Christmas is only an example,
followed by many other celebrations, which let a brand
become global by conquering other local markets. The
reaction to the Coke Santa, as a symbol of Christmas,
depended on multiple factors which represent the back-
ground of this way to celebrate winter holidays as it was
imported from United States.
Researchers approached globalization in different
manners. George Ritzer was one of those interested in
explaining this concept in connection with other terms, as
the next definition underlines: “Globalization is a trans-
planetary process or set of processes involving increasing
liquidity and the growing multidirectional flows of peo-
ple, objects, places and information as well as the struc-
tures they encounter and create that are barriers to, or
expedite those flows.“ (Ritzer, 2010: 2) The liquidity
metaphor develops a stylistic image of what dissolving
differences mean, by transforming solid specificity into
fluid and common reality. Solidity is related to the age
before globalization, when people did not easily accept to
stay away from their home, to cross the border or to
change their customs just for the sake of variety.
Everything relied on the transition from national consume
to the transnational one, by borrowing and adapting values
which did away with consumers’ rigidity.
This concept has been understood and defined from
multiple different angles, considering that its approach
became involved in various research areas such as: poli-
tics, sociology, anthropology, communication sciences,
semiotics. Scholte analyzed the most well-known percep-
tions in regard to globalization, by bringing to light five of
its accepted meanings: internationalization, liberaliza-
tion, universalization, westernization or modernization
and respatialization (2005: 16). The first one is the easiest
way to understand content, because it regards the process
of crossing-borders and establishing relationships
between countries. To liberalize has to do with removing
restrictions generated by political regimes, while to uni-
versalize is a term connected with sharing similar values
all over the world. The fourth concept comes very close to
the McDonaldization process or Americanization, because
it relies on consumer culture. To re-space is nothing else
than to open of spatial borders and the giving up of geo-
graphic space very well mapped in the past. Of course, all
these aspects were progressively and variously developed
in time, along with globalization earning the scientists’
interest. Going further with his approach, Scholte pays
attention to another concept, globality, which represents
“the sense of trans-world connectivity, manifested across
multiple area of social life, including communication trav-
els, productions, markets, finance .“ (2005: 49) The meaning
of his perspective emerges from making the association
between global values and their spreading across different
social and economical spheres.
The question we should ask now is this : “What is hap-
pening to local values”? Have they been swallowed up by
global movement or did they find a way to survive by
assimilation or integration into new frames? It is unlikely
to believe that culture, tradition, history may be compro-
mised by marketing or political interests, considering the
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consumers’ insight and their life representations. Pieterse
argues that these aspects are based on the idea that global-
ization is a plural process which cannot be reduced to a
single approach, generally available in any field of action
(2009: 65-70). The main point emphasized here by him
consists in making a difference between many views on
the globalization, according to its impact in many areas.
According to Pieterse, international relationships, socio-
logical sciences, communication sciences, political glob-
alization should be conceived in a different way because
their global features focus on divergent aspects. There -
fore, we can talk about this concept as a multidimension-
al process, otherwise it is likely that its perception may
generate confusion and may cover other significant phe-
nomena of modernity. The researcher strongly believes
that “In cultural studies, the focus is on global communi-
cations and worldwide cultural standardization, as in
Coca-colonization and McDonaldization, and on post-
colonial culture”. (2009: 66) This is why, hybridization is
another concept derived from globalization, as a result of
the syncretism between global and local dimensions of
each culture. Cultural hybridization refers to the mixing of
universal values with local ones, by preserving national
identity and importing external consumers models and life
styles. Using a metaphorical definition Pieterse claims
that “hybridization is the making of global culture as a
global mélange.” (2009: 83) Advertising became the core
of the whole world by developing general brand strategies
and creating compelling messages disseminated all over
the world. The way a brand image gets to international
markets asserts hybridization as the most effective solu-
tion. Moreover, commercials seem to be creative because
they are free of any restrictions in regard to using cultural
references, choosing the most suitable symbols and
enriching consumers’ mind by new meanings of everyday
life. Any commercial may be viewed as a land of promise,
taking into account the appeal to the consumers’ psycho-
logical and social needs.
The opinion above implies a very challenging concept,
namely global culture that should be immediately con-
nected with cultural identity. To deal with the consumers’
life, advertising has to find a way to glocalize a brand by
adapting it to the cultural identity of the market, even if
this requests some changes. There are some dangers when
working on these aspects which may compromise a brand,
if the hybridization does not strike a balance between the
local and the global for the sake of the customers’ loyalty.
The most important aspect could be identifying the profile
of every market that should not be associated with other
regional features that might be similar. A global brand eas-
ily travels all over the world, crossing geographical
borders, catching up values and delivering hybridized
messages.
The next questions we are interested in is how identity
and globalization survive together and which are the pat-
terns developed by advertising according to this symbolic
marriage. According to Arnett, there are four possible
relationships between cultural identity and globalization,
and their relevance may be obviously marked out in cam-
paigns both for global and local brands. The first one
refers to bicultural identity, which explains how people’s
identity is divided between local and global characteris-
tics. The second aspect focuses on identity confusion, aris-
ing from people’s difficulty to make the difference
between global culture and their local roots. The reason
for this mix-up may be the assumed ignorance of genuine
values, considering that the external ones are more attrac-
tive, or trying to replace local culture by the global one in
a chaotic way. The confusion comes up from the feeling of
belonging to the global world in which people usually
include specific features of regional or local identity. The
third aspect regards what Arnett called “self-selected cul-
tures”. This concept is understood as a way of rejecting
both types of culture, local and global in favour of a par-
ticular one, especially created to feel differently and to
lose their identity in the masses. The last type of relation-
ship between culture and globalization relies on the belat-
ed looking for identity , and being influenced by econom-
ic globalization, which generates disruption and isolation
of traditional landmarks. This approach creates various
new identities built in such a way that globalization can be
fully understood.
Coming back to terms related with advertising , we
believe that the first relationship which can be easy iden-
tified is bicultural identity. It is often discovered, because
emerging global brands on the local markets implies cre-
ating a double personality, and this is the main principle of
appealing to the consumers. By comparison, the second
type could be generated by adopting global values without
making the difference between them and the local ones,
involving identity confusion. In this situation, consumers
like to copy external values and to internalize them as if
they had always represented their genuine nature. The last
one is closely connected with niche identity, consisting of
identifying him/herself with the goods that people con-
sume as a sign of self-image. In the beginning, this was
the way McDonaldization was perceived before it became
a globalized consume culture.
How a brand wins the war against other brands all over
the world and imposes its values is very well explained by
Nigel Hollis, whose definition points out the relationship
between countries, consumer and culture: “I define a glob-
al brand as one that has transcended its cultural origins to
develop strong relationships with consumers across differ-
ent countries and cultures.” (Hollis, 2010: 25-26) There
are no doubts that communicating their old values, those
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brands were immediately assimilated by local markets and
created consume cultures such as: McDonald and Coke.
Sometimes, this process of globalizing a market implies
surpassing various impediments, sometimes it is helped
by the power of its values, that the world already shared
by for different reasons. In the first case, advertisers face
cultural paradoxes like product rejection, and religious
restrictions, so they should appeal to consumers focusing
on their local identity. As Marieke de Mooij emphasized
that “There may be global products, but there are no glob-
al people.” (2010:5), cultural diversity cannot be easily
standardized at all. The second situation brought to light
basic universal values effectively associated with brand
image and cultural appurtenance. History and religious
traditions speak always to the consumers’ heart and draw
their loyalty, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, they
may offer another cultural dimension to the practical rep-
resentations of life. John Tomlinson strongly argues that
culture may be understood according to its purpose, and
everything becomes a symbol while gradually connecting
to daily life. In his opinion, marketing and advertising
developed symbolic representations, that mark out com-
mune cultural affiliation and the same view upon life: “On
the other hand, many of the symbolic representations
found in marketing, whilst having ultimately and instru-
mental (economic) end, are for many purposes, very prop-
erly cultural.” (1999: 18)
We can conclude that brands successfully reach global
markets by creating an image whose starting point relies
on consumers’ perspective upon life, on their way of cel-
ebrating it, especially when it comes to old and immutable
values. Coca-Cola has a very interesting and dynamic his-
tory precisely because the brand created a cultural monop-
oly by reinventing the way people enjoy celebrating
Christmas. Between 1923 and 1943, the Coca-Cola’s life
stage was called the Golden Age, because the brand
brought up a lot of innovations which is still on the mar-
ket. One of them is the symbolic positioning, for which a
very familiar and popular character was coined, no other
one than Santa Claus. Since 1931, Santa became the
image of every Christmas campaign, due to the colors’
significance, which was inspired by the Coca-Cola logo-
type. Therefore, at this point, we can speak about two
important marks of the brand: logo and emblem. When it
came with the message: There is a magic night each year
when a man of great renown…the soda was almost
mythologized and became a symbol of Christmas.
According to Marling, “Santa in general underwent a
major revival in the 1930s, offering reassurance in the
dark night just before the dawn of Christmas Day.” (2001:
215) In fact, the brand changed the religious character
directly connected with offering gifts, being generous and
sharing love. All these were earlier identified with nobody
else than St. Nicholas, sometimes also called Saint Nick.
The religious stories created around his personality very
well preserved by the orthodox and catholic traditions
made him known all over the world as the Gift Giver, the
saint who helps poor children and families, before
Christmas celebration.
Santa Claus was created to represent not only Coke’s
image, but also to bring to light people’s hopes and
dreams. Santa ended up being the most famous character
of winter holidays and helped the brand expand its king-
dom. Nowadays, there are not many people who really
follow the history line to discover that Santa Claus was a
Coca-Cola creation, because they believe in his associa-
tion with Christian values. Giving birth to a symbol, Coke
enriched its image for ever and made its power intangible
by revitalizing Christmas values on the market and having
the monopoly on them. Creating an aura around it is the
most important aspect a brand should strive for, because,
according to Van Gelder: “A brand’s heritage also consist
of the brand’s typical or symbolical products”. (20010:
36) Even if in the beginning the main purpose was to bet-
ter promote the brand, the Santa Claus’s dream for Coke
later represented the starting point of Christmas culture
which has no more to do with Americanization, because it
was already swallowed by the globalization phenomenon.
Moreover, Coke succeeded in not adapting to the local
market, in this case, rather standardized it, by imposing a
symbol that cannot be changed or rejected by another cul-
tural influence, at least in the Christian world. The
hybridization does not affect the Santa culture, on the con-
trary, it unfolds additional values around the same symbol,
making it more powerful and increasing the brand effect
on consumers.
The Romanian market, obviously a traditional one
from the religious point of view, got into the Santa dream
land at the same time when doors opened to the global
brands, after the abolition of the Communist regime in
December 1989. People who grew up in Ceausescu‘s time
had never met Santa Claus before for two reasons: firstly,
the religious rituals and any other connection with church
were firmly prohibited and secondly, parents replaced him
with a local figure, called Santa Frosty. His role was the
same as Santa ‘s and the entire script followed similar
principles, even the color of his clothes – red and white –
were faithfully preserved, despite the lack of awareness of
symbolical Coca-Cola. By that time, people did not have
access to global brands and products, because of the
Romanian isolation in Europe, and celebrating Christmas
generally meant only enjoying winter’s beauty. Children
were taught traditional songs, whose main characters were
Jesus Christ and Santa, despite all restrictions. Their
image about the man who brought presents was either a
religious one preserved in the family, or a Communist one
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imposed by the regime, not even allowing his being called
by his real name. Nowadays, there are no differences
between Romania and other countries and the advertised
Santa regained his authority on the market, and is very
welcome by local consumers.
Method Specificity
The method I used for checking out and proving my
hypothesis is the content analysis. Even if we did not
intend to pay attention to the entire evolution of this
method over the ages, we need to specify that the perspec-
tive considered important for us is the one belonging to
Werner Früh in his paper Inhaltsanalyse, Theorie und
Praxis published in 1998. According to him, “content
analysis is an empirical method used for iterative, system-
atic, inter-subjective depiction from the point of view of
content and formal observations of the given papers.“ (1).
(apud Rössler, 2005:20) As for us, this definition seems
more relevant in comparison with others, because the
autor’s view is in favour of its more flexible application.
The most important advantage of this method is that it
approaches the research problem from many perspectives,
usually interdisciplinary. The second advantage lies in the
possibility of applying it in many research fields including
Communication Studies. This method works in two direc-
tions highlighting its efficiency: the quantitative analysis
and the qualitative one. I used the first one as a basis for
the second one, as I am interested in how the story is said
in advertising using myth’s structure.
The quantitative approach relies on the frequency cri-
teria which gives the opportunity to quickly reach a con-
clusion based on the number of registrations. The evalua-
tive criteria are useful in the present research due to the
opportunity of establishing connections between commer-
cials’ topics, in this case, and the values they involve. The
evaluation consists in finding a way to organize messages
provided by the selected commercials according to the equi -
valence between their semantic features and social pro ces ses,
values, positioning types, family and gender representations.
Thinking about the generosity of this method, this
study points out the qualitative research and its meaning
by using a special mechanism of analysis, which consist
of: firstly, summarizing content analysis and secondly,
structuring content analysis. This distinction belongs to
Ph. Mayring, alongside with another one, not significant
in the present research: explicative content analysis (Apud
Agrabian, Mircea, 2006: 111) The sumarizing content
analysis reflects how the essential information can be dif-
ferentiated from non-essential one, how similar para-
graphs can be organized according to the same criteria.
The structuring content analysis helps a lot in giving an
appropriate structure to the symbolic representations.
Research corpus
Our research corpus consists of 40 commercials select-
ed according to two important criteria: first, the time they
were broadcast on the Romanian market and, second, the
channel used for sharring the message to the customers.
The commercial campaign we are interested in was
around the Chrismas holidays -between December 9th
2010 and January 9th 2011. Regarding the other criteria,
our research focuses on TV Romanian commercials, espe-
cially broadcast on private channels such as: PROTV,
PROTV cinema, Antena 1, Realitatea TV. All the spots
watched were broadcast in prime time, namely between
8pm and 11pm, considering that the audience higher dur-
ing news, movies, and talk shows. The TV spots provid-
ed us various clues regarding Christmas time, based on
the syncretic way of delivering the message: both visual
and verbal communication.
The hypothesis strongly influencing the lines of our
research is connected with the keywords we think are
really representative of this article: glocalization, adver-
tising, consumption culture, Christmas time, traditions.
Therefore, we intend to verify how much Romanian com-
mercials are related to global ones, by launching special
campaigns at the given time. The next assumptions regard
how we come to terms with some aspects:
• The global brands definitely rely more on traditional
Christmas symbols than the local ones.
• There are some local features interweaving with the
global ones, encouraging the hybridization phenomenon.
• Globalization is represented by well-known marks all
over the world and the message is standardized.
• The family, women and children are the characters
often met in commercials’ script.
• This research is interested in a range of values that
focus on the attributes of Santa and Christian attitude.
During our research, we are going to answer some
important questions, and their role is to organize the quan-
titative data by using frequency criteria, on the one hand,
and, on the other one, to help us check previous assump-
tions. In addition, the results strongly depend on the accu-
racy of these questions, considering they are variables of
the content analysis applied in the present study:
• Which are the promoting brands broadcast on
Romanian TV channels and what product categories do
they belong to?
• What kind of values were often brought to light in the
commercials watched?
• What are the Christmas symbols provided by the
commercials’ messages?
• Who are the main characters/ heroes of the analyzed
commercials who convey the Christmas message?
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Quantitative resultsWhich are the promoting brands broadcast on
Romanian TV channels and what product cate-gories do they belong to?
The first issues this research focuses on are related to
the product categories and their brands that developed
campaigns during the time dedicated to collect the neces-
sary data for the study. Some people would believe that
any product category represented by various brands are
equally interested in promoting their values at this time,
because Christmas suits all wishes and hopes of the con-
sumers. The next chart will strongly make out a case
against this idea, by showing a different Romanian market
perspective:
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As the previous table indicates, there are 8 product cat-
egories, differently represented on advertising market,
according to their number of commercials broadcast
around Christmas. We broadly organized the products in
general categories in order to offer a better view on the
Romanian market at that time. There is no balance
between them, because commercials were oriented to
three specific directions: first, communication, second,
food- chocolate, drinks and, thirdly- coffee, banks, super-
markets. This classification revealed us that mobile phone
communication, whose market has been quickly devel-
oped in Romania in the last 20 years, intensively commu-
nicated the brand values, because they perfectly suit con-
sumers’ insight. Everyone shares their good wishes at
Christmas and New Year and what else may be the easiest
way to do it than making a simple call? Mobile phone pro-
motions specially appealed to two types of users: the con-
servative people connected to friends and family, on the
one hand, and the young users interested in entertainment
and spending winter holiday together, on the other hand.
Chocolate, alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks are
tightly related to the Christmas spirit consisting of making
gifts and celebrating throughout parties. Food products
referred to traditional consumers, deeply interested in
cooking the Christmas meals for guests and family. This
short analysis of the most often product categories and
brands, whose commercials were broadcast before
Christmas time, show us that consumers were touched by
specific values, and this is the subject of the following
question we are going to answer to.
What kind of values were often brought tolight in the commercials watched?
To deal with this question, first we have to explain how
we decided to investigate this problem, in which the main
difficulties consist in finding a way to count the results.
Obviously, values are abstract and various as well, and, this
is the way we organized the data provided by our corpus,
choosing a few keywords that helped us make the things
clearly. In the beginning, we identify three important values
shared to the consumers in each commercial, coming to a
very long list that would have not helped the study at all.
The next step was to organize all values collected from the
first stage of investigation in categories, in order to apply
the research principles and work out this problem created
because of too many data analyzed at the same time. After
all, we chose a few keywords that describe very well the value
classes, based on general characteristics, such as: generosity,
history and traditions, love and care, healthy living, imag-
ination freedom, pragmatism and perseverance. Before we
individually present product categories, it is necessary to
explain the meaning of each of them. Generosity arises
from making presents, helping people, being grateful for
different things, showing respect toward the old aged.
History and traditions regards either the way people pre-
serve their customs in family over the years or how a brand
has been developing in time, without giving up its genuine
image. Love and care emerge from the way people take
care of each other inside their families, are responsible,
friendly and enjoy living life every minute. Health is a
keyword that covers many aspects revealed by this
research such as: eating natural (ecologic) products, being
beautiful and showing the power of body. The next cate-
gory cannot be easily described as long as it refers to deep
feelings like mind and imagination freedom, living under no
restrictions and having the power to come back to the past
or to jump to the future. Pragmatism seems to be related
to rational behavior, control overtake and good investment
of money or time. Perseverance is nothing other than
tenacity that people should always lay out (express) no
matter the activity they are involved in. Obviously, we
allocated a single value for every commercial, related to
one of previous identified classes. The following chart
provides the possibility to draw a comparison across the
values that came from the spots:
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These results reveal that there are four categories of
percentage, because the values are distributed two by two.
The previous table distinctly indicates that generosity
appeared more often in the sample, with 30%, followed
not so close by tradition and love, each of them covering
15% of the whole corpus. Healthy life and freedom are
placed on the next level, that sums up 12.5% of the com-
mercials researched. Finally, we come to the values indi-
cating pragmatism and perseverance, equally allocated in
the chart with 7.5%. Even if we identified 8 product cate-
gories represented by different brand in our corpus, it does
not mean that it is any correspondence between data. What
we try to clear up is that a value category do not make a
connection to a specific brand or products. However, if we
take a look at generosity, for example, we discovered that
it has been found in the message created for mobile phone
(Orange, Vodafone, Cosmote), supermarkets (Real),
chocolate (Milka, Raffaelo) and banks (BRD), while love
and care were developed by spots dedicated to mobile
phone (Orange), non-alcoholic drinks (Nestea, Coca-
Cola), alcoholic drinks (beer-Goldenbrau), chocolate
(Milka), coffee (Jakobs). The other reference values fol-
low a various distribution as well. The fact that a brand
(no matter how many services or products it provides to
the consumer) used different creative strategy in different
spots is very relevant for this study, because it brings to
light interesting way to appeal the target, especially at this
time of year.
What are the Christmas symbols provided bythe commercials’ messages?
Answering this question means to get us much closer
to the topic of the present study, by bringing Christmas
signs to light. The research relies on both visual and ver-
bal communication for providing more data connected to
this religious and cultural event. Because we analyzed all
commercials broadcast for Christmas, we noticed that a
couple of them were not especially dedicated to this time,
so the visual symbols are absent in 9 of the spots. These
commercials were broadcast before December 2010 and
the message was not changed or specially adapted to
Christmastime. For the rest of the sample, examples were
generous and quite easier to classify due to their homo-
geneity and strong connection with Christmas. Almost all
visual symbols identified during the research describe
Santa’s celebration in a global way, except from specific
winter landscape (Romanian landscape), parties, meals,
religious traditions, and songs. The next chart will be rel-
evant for this research question, according to the balance
between local and global features that explains the title of
this study:
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As the table above points out, house decoration on
Christmas is at the top of the list, considering the informa-
tion provided by visual symbols, such as Christmas tree,
lights, Santa representations, and snow balls. Their main
purpose is to specifically appoint the time when the mes-
sage reaches the consumers. The next two levels strive for
the same goals, meaning to create the Christmas atmos-
phere by involving Santa’s presence and his particular fea-
ture of giving presents for people. Traditional culinary
reflect the association of Christmas party with special
meals, cooked at home, based on the traditional old
recipes. Parties show us how Romanian people spend their
time together, reminding themselves their childhood and
having a particular style of entertainment (they drink
boiled wine, sing Christmas songs, pay visit to their rela-
tives). Winter images help consumer identify themselves
with familiar landscape by recognizing Romanian moun-
tains, Bucharest view and other traditional places that
mark out the specific landscape. Coming to the last aspect
of the table, we noticed that commercials do not pay atten-
tion to religious aspects, in terms of using genuine bibli-
cal scenes, but they preserve some heroes like the three
magi, the stable and the holy family.
Who are the main characters of the analyzedcommercials who convey the Christmas message?
This question should be viewed as an extension of the
one regarding the values, whose results were presented
in the second chart. Obviously, the commercials charac-
ters should speak to the heart, because they become
models and heroes thanks to their behavior and perspec-
tive upon life. In this particular time of year, people, men
and women, young and old, are equally concerned about
welcoming Santa doing their best. Under this circum-
stance, we carried out our research to discover this:
which is the hero portray that is best emphasized empha-
sized by the commercial scripts. To deal with this ques-
tion, we had to previously decide which features are
requested from a character to become the Christmas hero
in a commercial. What does a hero mean? There are a lot
of things that help to clear up this problem. A main char-
acter touched by the Christmas spirit works on preparing
everything this time assumes: cleaning the house, shop-
ping, buying gifts, helping other people. There are spe-
cial features for women and men, but all of them have to
do with making people happy, being responsible towards
the family, preserving traditions and giving love. As we
expected, the ads are not usually created around one sin-
gle character, but he/she stands out by something special
and distinctive to other people. The next quantitative
results speak for their self about the Christmas heroes in
the corpus investigated:
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The previous chart provides us the chance to distin-
guish between three character categories. The first criteria
highlighted here is the gender and age axis (male, female
and children heroes), the second is based on the balance
between individuality and collectivity, and the last one
regards non-fictional heroes in comparison with the fic-
tional ones, from animation. What predominates in this
quantitative approach is strongly connected with the first
criteria we have just described: masculinity covering 40%
of the whole corpus. Quite difficult to explain is that chil-
dren seem to be placed only on the last level, although
they are the special target of Santa magic. The only reason
we believe is important here is related to the difference
between a product buyer and its consumer. The adults
(grow-ups) are responsible to give presents to children
and make their dreams become true. However, collectivity
(including crowds of people, family and animation
heroes) and individuality (male and female hero) are
equally represented in the table above.
Discussion
Coming back to the issue focused on product cate-
gories and the brands that belongs to them, we realized
that local names are almost missing from the list of spots
broadcast at Christmas, except the phone services
Romtelecom, the beer Bucegi and Timiºoreana, the cake
Boromir and the wine Urlat. This fact helps us clear things
up regarding the balance established between the global
and local features of Romanian commercials. Another
aspect pointed out by this issue is the specificity of prod-
uct categories in order to make a connection between their
main characteristics (benefits) and Christmas image.
Comparing with other seasons, spices are very well repre-
sented given the Romanian custom to cook traditionally.
Alcoholic drinks are related to entertainment and parties,
especially because young people like spending time
together. Chocolate is not usually connected to Christmas
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time unless it is gift for children , because it always has
been considered the best way to be friendly, lovely and
polite. As we have already noticed, communication tools
reflect an increasingly globalized and globalizing world
much better, because people bring Christmas to their
homes through a single phone call. This is the main strat-
egy that Vodafone uses to promote its international mobile
phone service, choosing a time when people try to ignore
distances. The big idea this brand appealed to in one of its
Christmas commercials was to make consumers’ life eas-
ier by dissolving barriers and by converting a phone call
into a conversation, as the protagonist says: “It’s about
conversation, baby!” From this point of view, Orange and
Vodafone, the oldest competitive mobile phone services
on the Romanian market reach their customers differently.
Orange, represented only by two examples in our sample
is oriented towards the global Christmas celebration,
while Vodafone comes closer to Romanian needs, which
are more interested to communicate with their relatives
who have temporarily or definitively moved to another
country. However, this product category, which covers
30% of the entire corpus, is a strong evidence for the
weaving between the local and global.
The next question previously approached regards the
values provided by the behavior of spot heroes, and the
results do not look particularly inquisitive at all, consider-
ing generosity a bridge between everyone and everything,
no matter which country people belong to. The idea is
available for love and care, related to the similar issues:
family, friends and pets. Tradition is the only category that
makes the difference here, because it is very well contex-
tualized. In terms of looking for a relationship between
global and local, the table shows a convergent strategy of
reminding Christmas values to the customers, so we can
bring forward a standardization of the creative strategies
developed by the analyzed campaigns.
In addition to this, symbols enrich the global view on
Christmas, except traditional meals, obviously related to
local culinary customs and very important for the atmos-
phere. Christmas parties cannot be associated with any
other ways of spending free time, because they follow a
special ritual emphasized by many commercials. Party
means here nothing other than enjoying traditional cake,
listening to old songs, making gifts, given cookies and
sometimes money to the children that sing Christmas car-
ols (similar to Halloween Treating by going from house to
house for collecting candies).
Another issue we focused on this study was to research
the connection between Christmas and every gender or
age, on the one hand, and collectivity or individuality, on
the other hand. This problem brings us closer than ever to
positioning based on emotional and rational consumers
needs. This time, masculinity, that takes up the highest
percentage in our chart, does not reflect only specific val-
ues, such as power, strength, skillfulness, but also sensi-
tivity, artistic taste and interest in history. Taking into
account that Romania is still a conservative country,
where the father is the authority-figure, emphasizing mas-
culinity is another way to lend significance to local fea-
tures. Men are very often in charge of highlighting
Romanian specificity, using sports personalities such as
football players (George Hagi for BRD and Cristian
Chivu for Vodafone), tennis players (Ilie Nastase for
BRD), journalists (Daniel Buzdugan for Germanos),
artists (Ciprian Porumbescu for Timiºoreana). Christmas
spots bring to light various professional categories, such
as: sailors, secret agent, businessman, sales man, con-
struction worker. What is very clear according to the qual-
itative results is that men, women and children, even if
they are individualized or belong to a family in a spot,
build up a traditional and local image of celebrating
Christmas in Romania.
Conclusions
Considering Christmas time an international holiday,
because it is celebrated in the entire Christian world, we
cannot argue that it is a simple case of globalization. From
the consuming point of view, we think Pieterse’s opinion
about cultural standardization and uniformization “as the
global sweep of consumerism” (2009: 44) is very well
implied, based on a couple of arguments. First, commer-
cials broadcast on the Romanian market belong especial-
ly to the global brands which obviously emphasized their
strong impact on local brands everywhere in the world.
Second, these universal Christmas campaigns are surely
helped by their promoted values connected to brand histo-
ry. Nobody could change Coca-Cola positioning based on
the cultural significance of Santa, who is not only a per-
sonality, but a symbol of welcoming Christmas, especially
for the children’s sake. From another perspective, this is a
kind of profane dissemination of the Christian spirit, by
using the story of the Magi.
On the other side, the Romanian consumers, like those
in any other country, preserve the tradition and conserva-
tively follow a local ritual of enjoying the culinary
aspects, rites, cultural clues of Christmas. Commercials
do not ignore all these, even if the genuine brands did not
originally build their image based on these. According to
Hollis, this is the strategy applied by a global brand to
appeal to consumers across various cultures. We are faced
here with two relevant processes for our study: hybridiza-
tion and localization. The first one consists of weaving
global symbols of Christmas with local ones, to make the
best marriage between cultures. Associating Coca Cola,
Vodafone or Cosmote (they are only a few examples from
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many others included in the corpus) with Romanian culi-
nary customs, and Santa with drinking boiled wine convey
cultural diversity. The main values of a brand rely here on
a specific background that has to be clearly highlighted in
the commercials. Localization regards the process of
adapting global values to the ethnic markets by preserving
the general framework and adding particular elements.
This is available not only for Romania, but for every space
the ad is created for. Starting from this point, we noticed
the localization phenomena for other global brands as well.
The local brands were represented to a lesser degree in our
sample and Coca-Cola came up with a single commercial,
but the other brands accurately preserve its connotations.
This means that localization and hybridization provide
example not of diversity, but of cultural diversities. The
easiest example that clears out this fact, was offered by a
Milka spot in which Santa is helped by no one else than a
bear and a marmot, the well-known symbols of winter
campaigns. Both animals do not remind the consumer
only of chocolate, but also of the Alpine landscape, so
they preserve local features of their country of origin.
Santa entrusts them with making gifts, replacing the elf
with Milka symbols, as he said in the beginning of the
spot: Okay, guys! This year I rely on you! This is a typical
case of localization, but also of purposefully conveying a
bicultural identity. Brand symbols and images alike
(Coca-Cola and Milka) equally collaborate to make chil-
dren’ Christmas happier. The verbal and visual message
provided by the end of this spot points out this idea of
weaving global and local values for the same purpose, by
using double means: Santa Claus stops at Milka every year
and fills up his sack with surprises of the finest chocolate.
To sum up the present debate, this research proves that
Christmas time basically reveals global features of the
commercials broadcast on the Romanian market, and
emerges its specificity, which is not limited only to gen-
uine brands. Hybridization comes from enriching Santa’s
image due to traditions, celebrating rites and rituals.
Localization assumes to adapt consecrated symbols to the
Romanian market consumer insight, according to con-
sumer lifestyle at this time of year. Drawing a general con-
clusion, we are faced with another type of glocalization,
which relies on specific cultural and religious principles,
more emphasized due to the meaning of Christmas for
ages. Romanian advertising cannot be described as a spe-
cific one for sure, due to the homogeneous representations
of celebrating Christmas everywhere in the world.
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Endnotes
(1) In orginal language „Die Inhaltsanalyse ist eine
empirische Methode zur systematischen, intersubjektiv
nachvollziebar Beschreibung inhaltlicher und formaler
Merkmale von Mitteilungen”.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the strategic grant POS-
DRU/89/1.5/S/62259, Project „Applied social, human and
political sciences. Postdoctoral training and postdoctoral
fellowships in social, human and political sciences”, of
the University of Bucharest, cofinanced by the European
Social Fund within the Sectorial Operational Program
Human Resources Development 2007-2013.
Assistant professor Mãdãlina MORARU (BUGA),Ph.D., Faculty of Journalism and Mass Communication
Studies, University of Bucharest, Romania.
E-mail: [email protected],
Address: Bd. Iuliu Maniu, nr. 1-3, Complex „Leu”,
Corp A, etajul 6, sector 6, Bucureºti, Romania.
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