A five-country comparative content analysis of food product advertisement from south eastern Europe: the cases of Bulgaria, Croatia, FYROM, Greece and Serbia

Abstract

Cultural differences have been occupying the interest of many researchers for a long period of time. Many of them have stated that in most cases the cross-cultural research is being done between cultures that are already known to be significantly different from each other such as the US and Korea, or the United Kingdom and Japan. This is one of the main reasons why in this dissertation the cultural differences among the five countries: Bulgaria, Croatia, FYROM, Greece and Serbia, all countries located in the South Eastern part of Europe, are being analyzed. This has been achieved by using a comparative content analysis of food product advertisements coming from the above mentioned countries. Firstly, the analysis focuses on the possible differences among the advertisements coming from the five countries in terms of content, values, claims, style and model used. Secondly, analysis of the same variables is carried out in terms of advertising type (infomercials and commercials) and food type (functional and hedonic food). As expected, the main finding is that there is no significant difference among the variables used based on national origin. Still, the data analysis shows statistical differences in the cases of advertising type and food type in many of the values considered. The main conclusion is that all five countries apply almost the same variables, despite the food type or the advertising type used. This leads to the conclusion that if marketers want to make an advertisement for a product available in the five countries mentioned above, there is no need to make five different commercials. In fact, the cultural similarities found in this research suggest that only one can be used since it will fit the demand of the populations in those countries. The only requirement would be the change in language.