Do the Little Emperors Rule? Comparing Informativeness and Appeal Types in Chinese, American, and French Magazine Advertising

This study compares the informativeness and the appeals used in magazine advertising in China with those used in France and in the United States. It provides international marketers with a snapshot of current magazine advertising tactics and provides scholars with an assessment of how consistently expectations based on seminal cross-cultural research predict the informativeness and the appeals used in magazine advertising in each country. Surprisingly, the expectations based on the literature were most often inconsistent with the observations. These findings should serve as a reminder to international marketing scholars that the seminal cross-cultural works, as useful as they are in providing cultural insights, were never intended to apply equally to all subgroups (e.g., the Little Emperors) within a culture.