Abstract

The effect of accent is well researched in many areas. However, marketing and advertising research rarely paid attention to this topic, and most previous studies were conducted in English-speaking countries, thus we know very little about the effect of accent in other language contexts. Chinese advertising has made a major progress in the past few decades, and the advertising industry is becoming more diverse. Nowadays, there are mainly three types of Chinese advertisements in terms of language and accent: standard mandarin advertisement, standard foreign language advertisement (i.e. English, French, Korean, etc.), and foreign accented mandarin advertisement (i.e. mandarin spoken by foreign spokesperson). In this paper, based on the studies done by Krishna and Ahluwalia (2008) and Lin and Wang (2016), we investigate the effect of spoken languages and accents on consumers’ evaluation of TV advertisements. More specifically, we choose standard Mandarin, English, and English-accented Mandarin as our major focus, and study the impact of accent/language on advertisement evaluation, as well as Chinese consumers’ attitudes towards different accents/languages. In addition, we take product origin into consideration, and study whether the congruence between the accent/language and product country of origin can lead to more favorable advertisement evaluations among Chinese consumers. This study fills the knowledge gap and draws managerial implications for marketing practitioners in Chinese market. Besides, this study also contributes to the discussion of standardized campaigns outside English-speaking countries, as well as the country-of-origin effect of accents.