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Both television and movie rating systems are used to inform parents, caregivers and prospective viewers about the content which will appear in a program. While rating systems are fallible, they do provide information prior to viewing. Unfortunately, television advertisements are not rated. Can a parent or caregiver feel confident that a child restricted to a particular level of viewing content will avoid being exposed to advertising content which exceeds the program rating? The purpose of this paper is to explore the content of advertisements relative to an established rating system.

Advertisements were assigned ratings based on the TV rating criteria. Comparisons between advertisement ratings and program ratings are provided. Additionally, advertisements are examined for unrated mature themes.

More than half of the advertisements analyzed across all program ratings were deemed appropriate for all audiences. However, it was discovered that advertisement content exceeded the content rating of the program during which it aired over 20 per cent of the time.

The findings show that the content of about one in every five television advertisements will have content that exceeds the content rating of the program in which the advertisement appears. This has the potential to undermine parental or caregiver restrictions on a child’s viewing content.

Noting the lack of research on cultural effects on retailing, the present study uses the cultural framework developed by Hofstede as the foundation for an investigation of loyalty to domestic retailers. A multi‐country survey of consumer attitudes about domestic versus international retailers explored the effects of two cultural variables (individualism and uncertainty avoidance), two individual‐level demographic variables (age and sex), and one country‐level demographic variable (the ratio of imports to GDP). Results indicated that cultural individualism is negatively correlated with loyalty to domestic retailers, uncertainty avoidance is positively related to loyalty to domestic retailers, the ratio of foreign imports to GDP is negatively correlated to loyalty to domestic retailers, and men exhibit greater loyalty to domestic retailers than women do. Age was not a significant predictor. A procedure is presented for extending these findings to more than 45 additional countries. Implications of these findings for international strategic planning by retailers and directions for future academic exploration are discussed.

Although services, in general, have increased in significance worldwide, financial services face a less encouraging future. Market saturation has led to a search for growth opportunities. One approach has been to utilize traditional marketing techniques such as advertising. Another approach has been to expand into international markets. Managing the international advertising efforts of financial service firms is incredibly complex. This nine country study looks at consistency between advertising content and points of emphasis from financial strategy research. The comparison yields similarities and differences between critical managerial dimensions and themes in international financial service advertisements. Discussion of these findings and implications are provided.

The growth of international business, combined with an increase in the number of service offerings, underscores the importance of understanding effective promotional strategies for services versus goods in international markets. The current study examines advertising appeals for services and goods across four different countries: Brazil, Taiwan, Mexico and the USA. Results of a content analysis indicate that the use of rational and emotional appeals differs across both product type and country. It is suggested that culture plays a role in the use of the appeals and that the product type × country interaction is strongly reflected in Taiwanese and US advertising.

Examines differences in emotional and rational advertising appeal use across experiential and utilitarian services for 11 culturally diverse countries. Pooled across countries, rational appeals were found to be more dominant in utilitarian service advertising, while emotional appeals were used more heavily in experiential service advertising. On a country by country basis, utilitarian service advertisements consistently used a larger number of rational appeals, and experiential service advertisements contained more emotional appeals. Finally, culture appeared to influence the use of appeals more when the appeals were important to the service selling premise. That is, more variation across cultures was observed for emotional appeal use in experiential service advertising, and more variation was observed for rational appeal use in utilitarian service advertising.

Notes that more than 20 years of cross‐cultural comparative research results have suggested that advertising content varies between countries which are culturally dissimilar. Tests the proposition that paired comparisons of countries will yield statistically significant differences for most country pairs. Reports that of the 55 country pairs used in this study, 100 per cent of the pairs resulted in statistically significant differences on at least nine of the 29 values examined and that subsequent analysis found that insignificant results can largely be attributed to cultural similarity. Points out, however, that even when countries are culturally similar, statistically significant results may still be found. Suggests that research which tests for between‐country differences may not be insightful without theoretical support for the comparisons.

Trade in contraband amounts to billions of dollars each year, and yet the buyers of these products are still a mystery. The purpose of this study was to model the decision to purchase illicit goods, using four predictor measures: product type, buying situation, perceived criminal risk, and price. Part‐worth conjoint analysis was used to obtain individual weights of main effects and selected interaction effects on the willingness to purchase. Individual respondents evaluated the purchase of illicit goods differently. Cluster analysis was used to segment the respondents. Discriminant analysis was used to assess variable importance. The overall model was shown to be significant. Although the results varied by cluster, the main effects of product type, buying situation and price were all significant predictors of willingness to buy. The interactions of risk with product type and price with product type were also significant predictors for some clusters.