The effectiveness of Limburgian dialect use in advertising in the Dutch-German Border region Rhine-Meuse- North.

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Issue Date
2016-08-15
Language
en
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Abstract
With the fading of international borders and the free transport of goods and services in the European Union, organizations see their potential markets expanding across national borders. In order to reach these potential customers, business owners often invest in advertising. It is, however, extremely hard to stand out in the current overloading advertising climate. To stand out, organizations opt to use different ways to attract the attention of their customers. One way to do so is by advertising in a foreign language, which has shown to be effective. Language has, however, more levels than just being foreign. The current study looks into the effectiveness of using dialect in advertisement in a border region, the Rhine-Meuse-Euregion, in the south of the Netherlands. With dialect as an ‘in-between’ language between the Dutch and German language, it was expected to be more effective in advertising regarding the attitude towards the advertisement, attitude towards the product, the intelligibility of the advertisement and the buying intention of the product. In a 2x3 between subject experimental design, the current study did not find a significant difference in advertising effectiveness in either Dutch or the Limburgian dialect for Dutch inhabitants of the province of Limburg, inhabitants of the other 11 provinces of the Netherlands and inhabitants of the German province of Nordrein-Westfalen. Advertising in Dutch was considered to me more intelligible, though for the inhabitants of Limburg and the German border region the difference was not significant. Further research could opt for a within-subject design, to determine a specific preference for advertising in either Dutch or the Limburgian dialect.
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