Congruency of humour and cultural values in print ads: Cross-cultural differences among the US, France and China

Michel Laroche, Marcelo Vinhal Nepomuceno and Marie-Odile Richard

International advertisers routinely struggle to adapt humorous ads for the domestic markets of different countries.

Congruency of humour and cultural values in print ads: Cross-cultural differences among the US, France and China

Michel Laroche

Concordia University

Marcelo Vinhal Nepomuceno

ESCP Europe

Marie-Odile Richard

SUNY Polytechnic Institute

Introduction

Humour in advertising is a double-edged sword. What is funny for some might be offensive to others. Thus, the use of humour in advertising must be done with care as it may offend some audiences (Beard 2008). Nonetheless, humorous ads involve expensive bets. Estimates put advertising spending at $157.2 billion for 2013 in the United States alone (GroupM 2012), and roughly 10–30% of the total number of ads are...

WARC subscribers can sign in to keep reading

Not a subscriber?

Schedule your live demo with our team today

WARC helps you to plan, create and deliver more effective marketing

  • Prove your case and back-up your idea

  • Get expert guidance on strategic challenges

  • Tackle current and emerging marketing themes

We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

You’re in good company

We work with 80% of Forbes' most valuable brands* and 80% of the world's top top-of-the-class agencies.

* Top 10 brands