The influence of culture on advertisement

Résumé ou Introduction

The relevance of this topic is shown by the following true story of the Gerber Company:

Gerber once decided to sell their brand of baby food in a West African country. They exported the product and ran the same copy that had been selling jars for them by the billion since 1926. They put the famous label on the jar, with the baby wearing a big smile which, over the years, had helped them become a household name back home.

Reports soon came back from the distributor, announcing zero sales. Later, reports came back on the national news, telling or rioting in the streets, and casualties. Worried company chiefs watching television back home in the Unites States thought they glimpsed people burning copies of their poster in the background.

Much later, it transpired that in many African countries, there was a very real but hitherto undocumented assumption that what you see on the label is what′s in the jar. This came over to consumers as a coarse hint that the little boy, far from endorsing the product, was the product: people thought they were being expected to feed their black babies with white baby. Sensibilities were naturally offended by this immodest proposal, and outrage soon gave way to violence. (Anholt, 2000:51)

This story shows that culture has an enormous impact on advertisements. The fact that makes it more important than it has never been before, is globalization. As more and more companies are taking the decision to market their products abroad, they are facing cultural and linguistic dilemmas which international advertising invariably raises.
This report aims to give an insight into this complex subject.
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