Special Issue on the Use of Foreign Language in Consumer Marketing

Abstract

Welcome to this Special Issue of Journal of International Consumer Marketing! The first two articles of this issue address the topic of the use of foreign language in consumer marketing. This has been a topic of personal interest to me for some time. I have observed advertising in North America and Europe which contains the occasional foreign-language word or phrase to convey authenticity or stress country-of-origin. It is interesting to speculate how much foreign language is “enough:” a few words in Spanish (“Yo quiero Taco Bell”) or German (“Fahrvergn€ ugen”) will be an interesting curiosity in North American advertising, and continental European ads that use English are unlikely to cause much difficulty. Nevertheless, companies want to be sure they are sending messages that are decoded correctly by the target audience, and overreliance on foreign text would constitute noise in the channel. In fact, companies go out of their way to ensure the correct choice of words in order to appeal to the target audience. This holds for brand names as well: as one of many examples, Procter & Gamble carefully translates Mr. Clean two different ways for French-speaking customers (“Monsieur Propre” in France, and “Monsieur Net” in Quebec), due to local preferences. I’ve also been fascinated by the translation of Western brand names into Chinese characters. Names may be chosen to sound alike, or to have a desirable meaning. The best translations manage to do both. A classic example is the Chinese translation of IKEA, which uses characters that mean “suitable for the home,” and which sound similar to the European pronunciation of the brand name. Ideally, a special issue accomplishes a couple of objectives: it presents some of the newest thinking on an emerging research topic, and also provides direction for future work to scholars working in this research area. I am hoping that researchers interested in the use of foreign language in consumer marketing will find it to be one of their “go-to” issue to use for years to come. The first article in this special issue, by Raine Ng, Gerard P. Prendergast, and Ludwig M. K. Chang, explores the effect of different message features on the persuasiveness of Chinese-language online word-ofmouth. Ng et al. use a combined content analysis-laboratory experiment design to identify features of Chineselanguage reviews of Hong Kong restaurants, and to determine their effect on attitude and purchase intention. The authors use negativity effect, the elaboration likelihood model, and the theory of planned behavior to discuss their results. The second article, by Dursun Yener and Mertcan Taşçı o glu, examined the interaction effects between brand name, product label, and product type on consumer perceptions. They hypothesize that purchase motivation will differ by product type, so possibly the effect of a foreign-language brand name or product label will also depend on product type. The authors carried out a scenario-based experiment to manipulate brand name, product label, and product type. They found significant interactions: product evaluation and purchase intention were higher in the case of foreign brand names and bilingual product labels, as well as a significant three-way interaction including product type. To make this issue even more helpful to the research academic, I am providing below a list of six articles appearing in recent issues of JICM which addressed issues related to the use of foreign language in consumer product advertising, packaging, and brand name selection. This has been a topic that has garnered some interest over the years at JICM. I hope that readers will find the six articles below to be useful resources, as well as the two new articles appearing in this issue. The articles are: