Multinational Advertising: Factors Influencing the Standardised vs. Specialised Approach

Print and television advertisements for American products appearing in the USA, Germany and Japan are content analysed to explore factors influencing the usage of standardised versus specialised approaches in multinational advertising. Three factors are examined: market distance, product type, and advertising medium employed. The results of this pilot study suggest that messages transferred between Western markets (such as the USA and West Germany) are more likely to be standardised than those transferred between Western and Eastern markets (such as the USA and Japan). Product type is not found to play an influential role in the degree of standardisation employed. However, standardisation is found to be significantly more common in television than in print.