Resumen de The influence of context dependence and the individualism index in the language of graphic advertising in Spain and the United Kingdom
Before World War II it was only occasionally that companies could access the international business context. However, during the 1950s this situation changed, and nowadays it is highly unlikely that any company of relevance does not participate in international business transactions. As a matter of fact, Adler (1997: VII) states that companies obtain up to a fifty percent of their income from overseas trade. What is more, the improvement of communications has prompted the need to establish common ground for those involved in activities internationally.
In this context, several research projects have been commissioned by the European Community in order to assess the abilities to manage cross-cultural communication situations possessed by businesspeople. Therefore, it came as a surprise when the ELISE (1996-1998) and ELUCIDATE (1999-2000) projects stated that the lack of intercultural competence as a major flaw in the business context, and that Spain and the United Kingdom are, respectively, the first and second countries in business loss due to their general inability to handle cross-cultural communicative situations. Despite the lapse time, a new project was commissioned in 2005, the ELAN project (Effects on the European Economy of Shortages of Foreign Language Skills in Enterprise, 2005-2007), which proved that companies still need to be encouraged to enhanced their mastery of linguistic and cross-cultural skills.
Similarly, advertising professionals have to adapt to the global marketplace, and are becoming increasingly concerned about the appropriateness of employing the same advertising campaigns they will use in their homeland when they target foreign audiences. As a result, cross-cultural advertising has emerged as an interdisciplinary field of study the relevance of which grows due to the interdependence of international economies, the growth of the global market and the advent of e-commerce. Accordingly, a theoretical body and a series of practical strategies are need for the purpose of enhancing the effectiveness of international trade, and, more specifically, the design of advertising campaigns.
In that sense, this PhD dissertation aims at a double purpose. First, to explore, describe and explain the possible influence of cultural values on the design and communicative styles of British and Spanish graphic advertisements for food and beverages, particularly in relation to Hall's dimension of context dependence and Hofstede's individualism index. The motivation for this study comes from the aforementioned increasing importance of international trade and cross-cultural and intercultural communication strategies. The second objective of this study is to state a set of cross-cultural communicative strategies that might help British and Spanish professionals in the design of press advertisements for food and beverages aimed at Spanish and British audiences respectively. The two main research questions that arise from these objectives are: 1. Does the high/low context dependence cultural dimension actually affect the design of press advertisements for food and beverages in Spain and the UK? How does it influence their design? 2. Does the individualism index actually affect the design of press advertisements for food and beverages in Spain and the UK? How does it influence their design? As far as the sample is concerned, it was decided to compile 200 press advertisements for food and beverages (100 British, 100 Spanish). These were systematized following Moreno's (2008: 35) criteria for the purpose of achieving two equivalent corpora (Connor and Moreno: 2005: 155). After that, Guillén-Nieto's cross-cultural communication model (2009: 49) was adapted in order to derive a theoretical model of analysis. In particular, the categories connected to the context dependence dimension and to the individualism index were borrowed from her table of hypothetical correlations between culture-specific behaviours and language-specific behaviours (2009: 49).
In turn, the corpora were analyzed from both a qualitative and a quantitative point of view. The first stage, which made use of the ATLAS.ti software, examined the characteristics of each individual text from the sample in relation to the categories that formed the model. This stage provided an accurate account of the microlinguistic features of these texts. A move analysis was also performed on both samples. The purpose of which was to unveil the prototypical macrostructure of the genre of press advertising in the British and Spanish writing cultures. Secondly, the quantitative analysis provided statistical data in terms of the preferred patterns observed in the samples. This stage made use of SPSS software for the purpose of calculating the average presence of each category in each corpus. Additionally, a Chi-squared test was performed on both samples to examine the statistical significance of the differences between the British and the Spanish identified patterns.
In general terms, the results obtained agree with those arrived at by previous studies (Hofstede, 1980; Oliveras, 2000; Varner & Beamer, 2005; Kress and van Leuween, 2006; Vatrapu & Suthers, 2007; Guillén-Nieto, 2009; Ferraro, 2010). In particular, the language-specific behaviours associated with the context dependence dimension are clearly traceable in the sample. More specifically, the Spanish corpus was found to be greatly influenced by the high context dependence index in its preference for visual elements over the verbal code, its tendency to favour an implicit communicative style, an intensive use of contextual cues, and the abundance of people-oriented messages. On the contrary, the British sample was characterized by a higher ratio of verbal over non-verbal elements, a more explicit communicative style, and its tendency to produce task-oriented messages. As for the results obtained from the moves analysis it seemed to follow that, while the British advertisements followed a more complex structure in terms of the number of moves used, the Spanish messages only made use of the visual, the headline, and sometimes the copy move. These findings seemed to indicate that context dependence might not only reflect on the microlinguistic level of texts, but also on their textual macrostructure. Nevertheless, the results suggested that the individualism index, despite being noticeable in the communicative styles of both writing cultures, does not seem to be as influential in the design of British and Spanish press advertisements.
As for the implications derived from these results, it has been a capital interest of this study to create a final result that could benefit society in some way. Given the major impact that a lack of cross-cultural abilities has in international trade, a set of communicative strategies for the design of cross-cultural advertising has been elaborated. These can be summarized in the following rules of thumb:
1. When adapting a Spanish advertisement for a British target audience, try to provide detailed information about the product; be direct and explicit; produce a task-oriented text by clearly stating the benefits provided by the product; try to organize the elements from top to bottom.
2. When adapting a British advertisement for a Spanish target audience, try to provide visually attractive elements; do not give too much information; do not convey your message too explicitly; try to produce a people-oriented text; use a diagonal line to structure the elements of the page.
