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

Michel Laroche, Marcelo Vinhal Nepomuceno, Marie Odile Richard

• International advertisers routinely struggle to adapt humorous ads for the domestic markets of different countries. In order to provide them with better guidelines, we conduct a content analysis of humorous print ads from China, the United States and France. We found that the cultural values deemed important in a given country are rarely portrayed in humorous ads. This suggests that advertisers may be using humour to promote their products and services with cultural values not endorsed by the general population. Alternatively, advertisers may be ridiculing values that are less important, to attract attention while not offending audiences. Finally, we found that the type of humour used when a given human value is made salient is usually not the same in different countries.