Humor in Cross-cultural Advertising: A Content Analysis and Test of Effectiveness in German and Spanish Print Advertisements

Humor preferences depend on the cultural background of the respondents. Designers of international advertising campaigns thus need to know how to adapt ads to the target market. The present paper runs two studies to test (1) whether marketers actually adapt the type of humor to the culture of the target market and (2) whether different types of humor elicit different effects in different cultures. Both studies use the example of Germany and...