A Verification Research On The Effectiveness Of Western Advertising Principles On Chinese Market:the Strategy Part

Since the reform and opening up era, China advertising industry had tremendously introduced the western advertising strategic principles and applied them without any verification. Therefore, the study aimed to verify the ecological validity of those principles and analyse the differences between two different advertising principles in China and western world.The study was based on the well-known masterwork of advertising, Persuasive advertising:evidence-based principles, which had summarized the Western advertising principles in past one hundred year. After transferred the35advertising strategic principles from this book to a standard content-encoding table, the study continued to code997sampled TV commercials from ADevaluation.com database. Therefore, combined the coding result and AD effect data, the study statically verified those principles one by one.Specifically, the study mainly discussed four questions.Question1:Did Chinese advertising ever apply the Western strategic principles? The research found that all principles were applied. The "Mere Exposure" and "Benefits" principle were most applied while the "Fear" and "Provocation " principle the least.Question2:Did the Western strategic principles be effective on Chinese market?20principles were found with its best effects;15principles like "News""Distribution","Attribution","Emotional Focus","Self-expression", and "Mere Exposure", had turn to be no statistically significant or even reverse effect.Question3:Why some Western strategic principles could not yield anticipated effects on Chinese market? Since it was a non-experiment research, the study could only deduce the differences which may stem from principles like "advertising production standards","mode of thinking","ethics and values" and "cultural context".Question4:Which principles were important to the AD effects in Chinese market? The study had built6AD effects models. According to the correlation coefficient, principles like "Benefits" and "USP" had highly positive influence, while "News" and "Attribution" negative.In conclusion, the study was hoped to be valuable for Chinese industry and assist them to make better use of Western strategic principles. However, due to the research design, it was still impossible to answer the causality between principles and effects which means more future studies are required.As advertising principles consist of "Strategy" and "General Tactics", the study was divided into two parts. This paper was focus on the "Strategy" part, Zhao Chengdong, graduate student from Xiamen University, would finish "General Tactics" part in another paper.