Masters Theses

Date of Award

5-1999

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Major

Textiles, Retail, and Consumer Sciences

Major Professor

Jinkook Lee

Committee Members

David W. Schumann, Nancy B. Fair

Abstract

As the American society has been facing more and more culturally diverse, ethnic minorities have indeed received more and more attention by many marketers and advertisers, particularly Asian-Americans. Because of their affluence and high educational attainment, the Asian-American market has become one of the most attractive and valuable markets since 1990. While Asian-Americans in the US has emerged as an important market, little has been investigated the impact of ethnicity on advertising effectiveness as measured of awareness, attitude toward the ad, attitude toward the brand, and purchase intention with the focus on Asisin-Americans. This study also further investigated whether this impact will be mediated by Asian-Americans' level of acculturation which was identified as either low- or high-acculturated individual in this study. In addition, Asian-Americans are composed of many different nationality group, the differences in the ethnicity among Asian Heritages are explored in this study as well.The three ethnic Asian-American groups chosen in this study wereChinese-, Japanese-, and Korean-Americans. An experimental study using selfadrniiiistrativequestioimaire, including attitude and purchase intention,acculturation, and demographic measures, was conducted in Knoxville and Maryville, Tennessee among three ethnic Asian-American subgroups (N=197),directed equally across ethnic subgroups.The results of interaction effect of individuals' acculturation level and the ethnicity of endorsers indicated that low-acculturated Asian-Americans were more likely to recognized the advertised brand when the advertisement was endorsed by their own ethnic (Asian) models.When furthered investigated the impact of the ethnicity of endorsers and receivers, and their interaction effect in each ethnic Asian-American group,results indicated distinct findings across the three ethnic Asian-Americangroups. The findings also suggested some implications for the areas of marketing and advertising to better understand these three ethnic Asian-American markets and the directions for future research are provided.

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