Effectiveness of standardized and adapted television advertising: An international field study approach

A number of papers have addressed the standardized versus adaptation issue over the last decade. Relatively few attempts have been made to assess empirically the outcomes of either of the two approaches to marketing strategy. This paper discusses the controversy in the context of advertising strategy. It presents the findings from a field study, which assessed a set of outcome measures of television advertisements from the perspective of the target market. A set of three advertisements was selected. The commercials within the set represented a different degree of standardization. Outcome measures included recognition, recall, believability, and purchase levels. On the basis of these measures, the standardized commercial was the worst performer, followed by the semi-adapted and adapted ones.