Stereotypes Portrayed In Cross-cultural Tourism TV Ads

For a long time, both Chinese tourism industry and its academic circle have notpaid enough attention to cross cultural tourism image planning. As a result, against thebackground of global consumption, the brand image of Chinese tourism has beenabsent. The cross cultural tourism communication has also fallen far behind manyforeign countries. The4A approach introduced by Echtner successfully identified howstereotyping strategy works to create myths of destinations in marketing material.This study aims to bring up more attention to a less discussed issue by conducting acontent analysis based on Ethner’s4A coding methods. It not only provides aninternational comparison of321tourism TV ads from61countries and regions, butalso employs cultural difference and alterity theories to verify the significance ofstereotype in shaping cross cultural tourism images.The results demonstrate3conclusions. First, cross cultural tourism ads containsdifferent stereotypes, in the form of repetitive emphasis on particular4Arepresentation (attraction, actor, action, and atmosphere). The character stereotypeseven coincide with the traditional classification of social groups. Second, ads withdifferent cultural and regional background construct different alterity images. Last butnot least, the above phenomenon is caused by cultural value as well as the disparitybetween primary need and secondary need for tourism.In the end, the article concludes with suggestions on how to promotecross-cultural tourism image through advertising: break the patterns assumed byothers; self reposition, trying to explore and stress new positive stereotypes; convertadvertising performance from high context to low context; transfer the advertisingappeal from “fun of travel” to “on the way” with strengthening the narrative functionof characters.