Effects of Multilingual Product Packaging on Product Attitude, Perceived Quality, and Taste Perceptions
Today’s consumers are confronted with a growing number of products with multilingual packaging. Let us exemplarily look at the German market: Besides product information in German, consumers will find additional foreign languages such as English, French,
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Introduction
Today’s consumers are confronted with a growing number of products with multilingual packaging. Let us exemplarily look at the German market: Besides product information in German, consumers will find additional foreign languages such as English, French, Spanish, Dutch or Greek on the products they use in their daily lives. A request to the customer service department for the brand Nivea revealed that multilingual product packaging is used because some products such as bath care and soap products are produced in one country and distributed in several other countries. The customer service employee stated that increasingly integrated European and international markets caused the introduction of more international product descriptions on packaging. From the marketer’s perspective, multilingual packaging is an effective costcutting tool: one standardized product – also with respect to its packaging – is distributed in a multinational market instead of offering different monolingual versions for every single country or language area. While the cost saving effect of multilingual packaging is obvious, it is rather unclear how foreign languages on product packaging affect consumers’ perceptions and product evaluations. Until now, these effects have not been extensively researched. In this paper, we investigate the effect of adding product information in a foreign language on a product’s packaging in addition to information in the native language of the country the product is sold in. An additional language can be seen as a cue or hint that points to another country or culture. We argue that its effect may be different depending on the relation or fit of the language to the product category. This study contributes to the literature by examining a cue pointing to a country or culture, which is less explicit than the well-researched phenomenon of country-of-origin-information. It has hardly been examined how these language cues are processed by consumers and affect product evaluation and purchase decisions. Thus, the phenomenon is interesting from a theoretical perspective. In addition, this topic is highly relevant for practitioners since multilingual packaging is omnipresent in the marketplace. While marketers aim at saving costs, foreign language cues may cause harmful effects that backfire by decreasing the sales of a product. Our findings indicate that this will indeed be
P. Verlegh et al. (eds.), Advances in Advertising Research (Vol. VI), European Advertising Academy, DOI 10.1007/978-3-658-10558-7_27, © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 2016
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Huettl-Maack and Schwenk
the case when the language elicits associations that do not fit to the product category. In the following sections, we will firstly present theoretical considerations and, secondly, provide an overview of related prior research. Subsequently we will describe our experimental study and discuss the results. It should be mentioned that we do not investigate the special case of foreign language use that is obviously targeting ethnic minoritie
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