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The first part of this monograph discusses new perspectives on advertising standardisation. Until recently the controversy over the applicability of standardised advertising themes or advertising campaigns has ignored the realistic marketing approach employed by a select group of multinational companies. The authors note that many companies take a theme or campaign that has been successful in one market, often their domestic market, and employ it in multiple markets; their approach is to make local subsidiaries operate within strict advertising parameters. Goodyear International Corporation and a few other firms, however, follow a pattern approach in which the theme or campaign is initially designed for multi‐market usage and local flexibility.

The purpose of this research is to study creative strategy and execution as opposed to all elements of marketing and advertising standardization. It explores the standardization model (e.g. global, glocal, local, and single case strategy) by examining the international advertising strategies that multinational corporations (MNCs) from North America, Europe, and Asia used in their advertising campaigns targeting two culturally different markets: the United States and China.

A content analysis of 210 print advertisements compares the extent of standardization in creative strategy and execution across product country of origin (Japan, Korea, Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States). Western versus non‐Western cultural cues are also coded and examined.

Overall, MNCs are more likely to adopt the glocal strategy than any other strategies in their international campaigns. Specifically, EU‐based MNCs tend to pursue the global strategy, whereas the North America‐based MNCs seem to favor the glocal strategy and Asia‐based MNCs tend to use local strategy. Western and non‐Western cultural values are found to manifest in the American and Chinese ads similarly, indicating a trend of increasing similarity in international advertising in face of global consumer culture.

The results of this content analysis provide a fuller picture in understanding the long‐standing issues of standardization in international advertising because of an approach to analyze creative strategy separately from execution. However, content analysis is inherently limited in inferring causality between observed patterns and mechanisms/variables that account for the patterns. Also, the time frame for sample selection, which is set as a year prior to the 2008 global financial crisis, is another limitation of the study.

There is an ongoing trend of using “one‐creative, multiple‐execution” strategy in international advertising. MNCs may distinguish advertising creative strategy from execution when developing their international advertising campaigns.

First, this study addresses the issue with a clear conceptual definition of standardization and differentiates the strategic and tactic standardization. Second, this is the first attempt to explore the standardization model using a sample of 51 multinational brands from North America, Europe, and Asia. The authors find that MNCs are practicing some standardization advertising strategy, but to varying degrees. Third, this study identifies and empirically tests two external factors – culture and convergence of external markets – that influence standardization.

This paper's objectives are firstly to systematically analyse patterns of research in international advertising standardisation (IAS) conducted among managers and secondly to suggest fruitful paths for future research in this area.

Content analysis of academic papers published in major marketing, advertising and international business journals.

Results show that overall future research would benefit from a unified definition of and measurement procedures for advertising standardisation as only these can ensure the advancement of knowledge in the field. Additionally, more research is needed in order to further explore process issues in advertising standardisation, especially a newly proposed perspective related to the implementation process of the standardisation decision. Finally, an interesting avenue for future research relates to the study of the subjectivity involved in the standardisation decision.

As with all literature reviews, this paper is limited to analysing works in a selection of the top academic journals in the field. However, a careful choice of the most important journals has been made, providing a good reflection of knowledge in the area.

This paper appears to be the first literature review focusing on manager studies in the field of IAS.

Focus is on the extent to which international hotel companies are attempting to standardise their advertising messages as they move towards serving a more internationally based market. The characteristics of advertising in the hotel industry are reviewed, together with an examination of the arguments for and against standardisation in international advertising. An overview of a piece of research undertaken in Hong Kong and the UK to determine the level of standardisation is provided together with the results of the project.

This paper reviews and critiques the standardization debate in international advertising strategy. First, the paper identifies the standardization, adaptation and compromise schools of advertising including their advantages and disadvantages and then presents some of the contingency models with special focus on variables related to products, customer segments and organization. Then, a number of deficiencies in the academic literature as a whole are presented. The conclusion is that the preferred school of advertising is the compromise school, but that the continuum perspective is of little use to practitioners as they want to know what variables determine the position on the standardization continuum in their sector and whether the level of standardization is increasing or decreasing.

In the heated debate about marketing globalization, the issue of brand standardization has received much less attention compared with advertising standardization. When both issues have been addressed, empirically or conceptually, they have not been considered simultaneously. The current study develops and empirically tests a framework to simultaneously consider brand and advertising standardization strategies. A survey was conducted among brand managers in firms operating in Canada, with data collected on a brand level. The results revealed an independence of brand and advertising standardization practices. It was also found that brand standardization was practised to a much higher degree than advertising standardization, with the most used combined strategy involving brand name standardization and non‐standardization of advertising. Effects of product type and brand age were also investigated. The findings clearly indicate that companies tend to “brand globally, advertise locally”.

This study aims to explore advertising strategies by US corporations selling consumer services overseas. Attention is extended to determining the type of standardized advertising (pattern vs prototype) that US headquarters tend to use in international campaigns, identifying major obstacles that impede advertising standardization and examining linkages between the use of creative approaches (standardized vs localized) and firms ' length of business and sales volume.

Using a descriptive approach and rigorous sample, the authors surveyed international advertising managers of US firms selling consumer services. A 57 per cent response rate provided the basis for testing two research questions and two hypotheses.

US firm headquarters tend to lean more toward the use of prototype standardization than pattern standardization. The major impediments of standardized campaigns are perceived to be cultural differences, alternatives in consumer lifestyles, language diversity, variations in worldwide market infrastructure and government regulations.

While demonstrating correlations in some areas, the authors offer some suggestions for future investigation of this important topic. By focusing on services marketing, the study does contribute to the extant discussion concerning advertising standardization/localization from the context of US-based services businesses marketing internationally.

The outcomes indicate that established business firms and firms with large sales volumes, compared to younger business firms and firms with small sales volumes, are more likely to use the standardized advertising approach than the localized approach.

The paper offers new insights into the standardized/localized debate where advertising researchers have tended to overlook the significance of service businesses in the international context.

Advertising for three self‐image projective products (perfumes, cosmetics and women′s apparel) were content‐analysed in UK, German and US editions of Vogue. The purpose of the study was to determine the relationship between market similarity and advertising standardization of these products over a longitudinal period. Based on the literature reviewed, suggests that, due to their degree of similarity in markets, the UK. and the USA would have a higher degree of advertising standardization than that which existed between the UK and Germany. Moreover, given the finalization of the European unification process by December 1992, the researchers sought to determine if market similarity remained a dominant criterion in advertising standardization practices. Results showed that advertising standardization was higher overall among UK and German advertisements than between UK and US ads. Moreover, findings indicated that only a single brand showed a higher degree of standardization over the six‐month period for all countries investigated, suggesting that market similarity still remains as the dominant factor in advertising standardization practices.

In the international marketing literature the issue of advertising standardization has ignited a lively and heated debate among academics and managers alike. However, the decision whether to standardize or not cannot be considered a dichotomous one. Develops a comprehensive framework to capture the relevant factors that determine the selection of the appropriate international advertising strategies and tactics. More specifically, first identifies three broad sets of factors (“local”, “firm” and “intrinsic”) which influence international advertising decisions. Then proposes that the standardization and adaptation of international advertising strategies represent the polar ends of a continuum of transitional stages. Finally, discusses the ways and the degree to which international advertising strategies can be adapted to different situations.

International advertisers up to now continue to be confronted with the question of whether to standardize or adapt their commercial messages. This debate over the standardization versus adaptation issue has involved both advertising practitioners and academicians interested in transnational advertising issues for at least the past four decades. There are three schools of thought regarding international advertising: standardization, adaptation, and the contingency perspective. Aims to review and contrast the perspectives of practitioners (ad agencies as well as clients) and academicians to this problem over the past 40 years. Observes interesting differences over this time frame, both within each of the two groups and between them. Finds practitioners to have alternated between the adaptation and standardization approaches over the four decades with a trend towards standardization, while academicians have mostly advocated the adaptation approach over the 40 years examined.