It has been assumed that the clarification of a message is a necessary element for successful communication. However, in the today's complicated and changing environment of business,marketing,media, it is shown that the clarification of the message o ...
It has been assumed that the clarification of a message is a necessary element for successful communication. However, in the today's complicated and changing environment of business,marketing,media, it is shown that the clarification of the message of advertisement may inhibit the effectiveness of communication.
This study started out from the conception that the ambiguity of messages in advertisement could contribute to the effectiveness of communication as well. That is, ambiguous messages could be more effective than clear-cut messages in certain contexts: when a company needs to establish its new corporate goal or identity or to change its specialty; when a company wants to re-establish its locally limited brand image as global brand image; when a company wants to launch a crossover product etc.
This study investigates how poly-semic advertising messages are interpreted and signified by different audiences. More specifically, this study explores what effect the advertising strategy of strategically emitting ambiguous messages makes on the consumer's recognition, emotional attitude, reliability, and attitude towards companies.
This study was to examine what was effective communication in advertisement when the company, provoking the people's negative emotional response, needs to establish new identities such as the goals and the special fields of business. In particular, the study was to investigate what effect the advertising strategy of strategically emitting ambiguous messages makes on the consumer's recognition, emotional attitude, reliability, and attitude towards the company.
It was hypothesized that the level of uncertainty avoidance index (UAI) which is suggested by Hofstede etc. would have an effect on audience's interpretation of ambiguous messages in an advertisement in especially consumer's recognition, emotional attitude, reliability, and attitude towards the company. Three texts from 120 ambiguous advertisements which had been published for recent 5 years were systematically sampled and the survey was performed by the means of questionnaires made on the sample.
The results showed that the ambiguous message of advertising texts in lower UAI country ( England) gained better responses on the consumer's attention, good impression, affirmation, memory, sympathy than higher UAI country (Korea) and that the ambiguous message had an effect on the consumer's attitude towards the advertisement itself. Thus, it could be tentatively concluded that the ambiguous message could be more effective in recognition and recall to promote the changes of identities of the company having the people's unfavorable emotion.
But there wasn't any evidence that an ambiguous message in an advertisement was more effective in terms of the consumer's emotional response, reliability, and attitude towards the company.
From this, it could be inferred that the receiver had an uncomfortable, doubtful and negative attitude about the implicit expressive code contained in the message. In the future deeper qualitative studies can compensate for the limited explanation of this empirical study focused on statistical analyses.
It can therefore be concluded that the theoretical framework of 'strategic ambiguity' has its limit in explaining its effectiveness in the entire dimensions of recognition, emotional attitude, and behavior, in the sense that the strategic ambiguity is most effective in recognition while it invokes more negativity in the behavioral dimension.
Finally, this empirical study, focusing on quantitative analyses, may have its limit as well; however, deeper statistic-qualitative studies in the future could compensate for it.