Cross-cultural discrepancies in persuasion knowledge and its effects on the responses to persuasive advertising tactics: The case of an individualistic and collectivistic culture.

Abstract

The main goal of marketing is to persuade the audience to buy a particular product or use the publicized service. Advertisers aim to create persuasive advertisements that evoke positive responses from consumers. There are various strategies (e.g. authority, commitment, liking) applied to obtain the desired outcome of marketing messages. However, the objective of attempts is sometimes diminished by the persuasion knowledge (PK) that targets possess and could result in Inferences of Manipulative Intent (IMI). People tend to establish coping behaviours to intentionally resist persuasion attempts and stop agents interfere in their psychology, but there are cultural discrepancies in the way in which people do it. The present research investigated intercultural differences in persuasion knowledge in terms of manipulative inferences with 3 hypotheses by using two different tactics (reciprocity and scarcity) and neutral condition. Furthermore, 2 hypotheses proposed the adverse effect of negative perception on ad attitude and purchase intention. In total, 115 Vietnamese and 115 Dutch participants’ responses were studied, since while the former is a collectivistic country, the latter is rather individualistic based on the cultural model of Hofstede (1980). The results showed that Vietnamese subjects scored lower than Dutch respondents on IMI in every condition. This entails that Vietnamese people perceived every type of ad as more manipulative. Moreover, increased inferences of manipulative (IMI) intent negatively influenced both attitude towards the ad and buying motive. Overall, the research demonstrated that persuasion knowledge is superior in the collectivistic, Vietnamese culture, regardless of persuasive strategy. This signifies that advertisers have to be more conscious when targeting people from collectivistic nations.

Keywords: advertising, culture, persuasion knowledge, inferences of manipulative intent