A Contrastive Analysis On Female Images In Chinese And American Advertisements From The Perspective Of Memetics

Female images widely exist in advertisements and are rich in cultural connotations.With the development of feminism and rising status of women in China and America,female images in advertisements have experienced great changes.Therefore,in response to this situation,the contrastive study of female images was brought into focus.The purpose of advertisements is to be spread widely,which coincides with the meme replication.Memetics,given its explanatory power,has been widely used in advertising studies.However,most research concentrates on linguistic units in advertisements and rare on images.Therefore,it is of practical significance to study female images in cross-cultural contexts from the perspective of meme replication.To this end,in this thesis,120 Chinese and 120 American video advertisements from two websites,namely cnad.com and iwebad.com have been collected for research.Both quantitative and qualitative methods are employed.Quantitative method is reflected in the descriptive statistics and data analysis of female features,which ensures the reliability and objectivity of the research.Qualitative method is mainly used in the analysis of different meme manifestations on female images between Chinese and American advertisements.In addition,case study of classic advertisements with reference to cultural dimensions is widely employed.This study shows that the meme manifestation of female images in American and Chinese advertisements differs in the achievement of authority,coherence,simplicity,novelty and conformity based on the four stages of meme replication.With reference to Hofstede’s cultural dimensions,cultural roots behind differences are identified and suggestions on meme coding in cross-cultural contexts are put forward in the end.The author hopes that findings of this thesis will provide a perspective for ads designers on how to create a strong image meme and apply it in cross-cultural contexts.