Female appeals across cultures: Analyzing the U.S. versus Chinese fashion magazine advertisements

With rapid economic and cultural changes in China, international fashion magazines have gained a foothold on the Chinese marketplace and are working to not only develop an understanding of the Chinese consumer but are also adapting Western fashion advertisements for this new environment. Such adaptation ranges from merely changing the language of the copy to a wholesale change of the advertising image, body, and text. In an effort to better understand the impact such advertisements might have on the Chinese consumer, I have developed a set of cross cultural categories of female appeals that can be used to examine the type and frequency of such appeals in both China and the United States. I also aim to examine how individuals in both countries respond to these various appeals and what they mean in the different cultural contexts. Using various methodologies, I have found that China's collective culture is slowly individualizing, possibly under the pressure of Western ads that are exporting culture as well as clothing. Additionally, I have found that there are generational differences at play within the Chinese marketplace that further confuse our understanding of the impact advertising and, in particular, fashion advertising has within that culture.