Expressions of individualism in German television advertising

Cultural values in advertising are researched for two main reasons: From a pragmatic point of view, understanding cultural values helps to design advertising campaigns that are better targeted towards a specific target audience. From a philosophical point of view, understanding whether cultural values are represented accurately or inaccurately in advertising helps to determine whether advertising might shape and change consumers' values over time.

Different cultural values are important in different cultures and the values that are present across cultures might be expressed differently in these different cultures. Therefore, when researching cultural values in advertising it is important to look at each important value in each culture separately. Taking values and standards defined in one culture and searching for them in the advertisements of other cultures might result in pitfalls, as each culture has its own values and expressions of values.

This study researched how the cultural value 'individualism' is expressed in German TV advertising using an inductive approach through document analysis. Germany was selected as the country of investigation as Germany has a powerful economy, is an important advertising country and the German market seems to be attractive for global companies. Therefore, it is important for domestic and international advertisers to be able to target the consumers in this market effectively. Individualism was chosen as several studies indicated that this is one of the most important values in Germany.

Using a sample of 320 different TV commercials recorded during a week of German primetime, the results of this study show that individualism is present in 72.5 percent of the ads. Eight different ways are identified how to express individualism in German TV advertising: the "Efficient Individual", (used by 19.4 percent of all ads), the "Attractive/Social Individual" (used by 18.4 percent of all ads), the "Sensual Individual" (used by 10.3 percent of all ads), the "Self-Expressive Individual" (used by 7.2 percent of all ads), the "Caring Individual" (used by 5.9 percent of all ads), the "Healthy Individual" (used by 5.6 percent of all ads), the "Safe Individual" (used by 3.8 percent of all ads), and the "Intellectual Individual" (used by 1.9 percent of all ads).

When cross-tabulating these different types of individualism with advertised product categories several relationships emerged between the nature of the products and the type of individualism that was used to promote the product.

Comparing the findings of this study about expressions of individualism in German television advertising with studies about expressions of individualism in advertising in other countries shows that some of the ways to express individualism like efficiency and attractiveness are used in advertising across cultures, whereas other ways like safety were only found in Germany and therefore, seem to be specific to one culture.

Managerial implications of these findings are discussed and the social responsibility that advertisers have when reflecting cultural values in a distorted way is addressed.