Framing across cultures: preferences for different message framing options

While there is an increasing body of knowledge of how cultural values play a part in international communication, there is still a lack of research looking at if and how cross-cultural differences influence health related public service or social adverts, which are often used as a main communication tool in social marketing campaigns. In previous studies, cultural values have been shown to have significant effects on advertising content, especially the appeals being used to advertise (Dahl, 2004). Specific to social and health ads, fear appeals, have been found to be interpreted differently across cultures (Sheer & Chen, 2008), other studies have highlighted differences in social obligation as a motivational factor across cultures (Barrett, Wosinska, Butner, et al, 2004). One of the few studies that used cross-cultural concepts linked to appeals used in smoking cessation advertising found that loss-framed messages were more favorably perceived in a uncertainty avoidant culture, whereas gain-framed messages were more favorably perceived by individuals from a low uncertainty avoidance background (Reardon, Miller, Foubert, et al, 2006). Against the backdrop of only limited research, this study aims to contribute to the debate on if and how cultural values can be used to predict preferences for certain appeals in public service advertising. This is particularly important for pan-national health promotion programmes, such as campaigns run by international bodies, such as the WHO, UNAIDS or the European Union, which at the moment tend to use the same adverts, tools and slogans across various countries. For example, the European Union’s HELP “For a life without tobacco” anti-smoking campaign uses the same slogans (translated), imagery and appeals for all member countries of the EU, despite that there are substantial cultural differences between these countries. This study compares preferences expressed for social adverts using different appeals for two major health issues, namely smoking cessation and condom use. 2000 male members of a gay networking website (1000 from the UK and 1000 from Portugal) who gave their age as between 18 and 35 were randomly selected and surveyed. The survey consisted of four pairs of mock up adverts promoting condom use, and four mock up pairs of adverts promoting smoking cessation, the two major health concerns among young (under 35) gay men. Each pair consisted of the same image with only the tagline changed – each pair testing for different message framing options (negative vs positive, aggressive vs supportive etc).When compared, there were substantial differences in the preferences expressed between the two groups surveyed, which suggests that different framing options are preferred by different nationalities.