Cultural and Social Values in Commercials of Ethiopia
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Date
2006-07
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
This study has analyzed the manifest content of 125 commercials broadcast on Ethiopian Television in April-May 2006 to examine their value content based on their value/ appeal type. The commercials were analyzed based on mainly Richard Pollay's concept of the unintended consequences of advertising and also on other advertising concepts. The framework for measuring the cultural content of advertising was formulated by Richard Pollay's (1983) and later adopted by other researchers. Thus the framework of analysis in this paper was mainly based on the adopted version of Mueller's; Cheng and Schweitzer's framework. Also used for analysis were other measures of the cultural content of advertising such as Westernization, materialism and consumption values formulated by several researchers such as Belk and Pollay; Tse, Belk and Zhou, etc.
The results show that the most dominant value in the commercial was modernity, followed by health, courtesy, family, enjoyment and tradition respectively, indicating that although Western value predominates overall, both Western and traditional values are prevalent in the commercials. The result also revealed that while the commercials portrayed some values that promote Westernization and consumption, in general they promote values that promote desirable social aims.
The results also showed that the commercials in Ethiopia stressed effectiveness, economy, convenience and quality of products/services indicating that they have not yet reached the level of sophistication of the West and they are in their beginning stage.
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Cultural and Social Values