Adaptations for the French Market

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to explore local adaptations of international campaigns with specific reference to France. We begin this discussion with an overview of approaches to international advertising, examining the advantages and disadvantages of tailoring global campaigns to individual markets. To gain a better understanding of how these strategies are applied to advertising distributed in France, testimonials from advertising executives working on international accounts for agencies in Paris (such as Publicis Conseil, Ogilvy & Mather, McCann-Erikson, among others) are also included in this discussion. Following this brief introduction to international advertising is a section outlining various concepts that appeal to French consumers. Included here will be an overview of the advertising creative strategies (emotional appeals, use of humor and sex, information content, and so on) most commonly used in French advertising as reported in the literature (for example, Biswas, Olsen and Carlet, 1992; Zandpour, Chang, and Catalano, 1992; Taylor, Hoy, and Haley, 1996). The final section of this chapter illustrates how multinational corporations are adapting their advertising for the French market using samples drawn from the corpus. Examples in the data include visual and textual references to elements of French culture, popular media, and the metric system.