Authentic Ethnic Advertisements Perception: An Abstract

Abstract

This research explores authentic ethnic advertisements from the target consumers’ perception of what authenticity in the ethnic advertisement is and how it is constructed. Newman and Bloom (2012) have stated that the higher the perception of authenticity within a product/service, the higher positive attitudes and outcomes toward the product/services. Thus, when advertisements are deemed as authentic, consumers have an overall positive response toward the advertisement itself (Miller 2015). The objective of this research is derived from the lack of literature surrounding authenticity within the ethnic advertisements and the increasing ethnic immigration, which generates a great added capital (Census 2011) for marketers to target.

Previous studies have explored authenticity within advertisements (Beverland et al. 2008; Tang et al. 2015; Freathy and Thomas 2015) and ethnicity within advertisements (Appiah and Liu 2009; Zungia 2016) in regard to consumers’ perceptions and attitudes in combination with their ethnic backgrounds. However, many of these studies and replicas came back incoherent with contradicting findings (Cui et al. 2009; Zungia 2016). Authenticity in ethnic advertisement is a topic area that has yet to be explored, which may be the reasoning for the inconsistent findings and a new justification to what consumers look for in ethnic advertisements.

Semi-structured interviews took place with the use of photo-elicitation, where respondents brought a few adverts that they felt were authentic to their ethnic background. A construct definition developed of AEA. Additional factors that heighten notions of ethnic authenticity emerged from the data; behavioral, body language, dress code, and social settings. These factors of AEA increase recall, purchase intention, and the overall success factors of the advertisement. These additional factors are more embedded in the consumer’s cultural knowledge of the ethnic background and their overall life experiences, which have been highlighted within the findings. Consumers with heightened cultural knowledge criticized ethnic adverts to a higher standard than consumers with low cultural knowledge, and, their standers to what constituted authenticity was higher. Moreover, notions of ethnic identity play a role on how consumers perceive authenticity within the ethnic advertisement and how consumers self-reference themselves. Consumers with higher ethnic identity and self-referencing perceived authentic ethnic advertisements more positively and increased positive behavioral outcomes toward the advert. This study also shows there are added factors to be considered when developing an authentic ethnic advert such as consumers self-referencing, levels of ethnic identity, location of the print advert (platform), and use of emerging factors of authentic ethnic advertisements, as notions of embedded cultural and ethnic knowledge are presented within these factors.