In today’s multicultural societies, ethnic targeting is increasingly important for marketing. Two main approaches to target ethnic minorities have emerged: messaging consumers when their ethnic identity is most salient, and featuring spokespeople who have the same heritage as the target. We...

Consumer embarrassment is an important concern for marketers. Yet, little is knownabout embarrassment in passive situations like advertising viewing. The authors investigate when and why consumers experience embarrassment as a result of exposure to socially sensitive advertisements. The theory...

The article contributes to current understanding of language effects in advertising by uncovering a previously ignored mechanism shaping consumer response to an increasingly globalized marketplace. Extending recent psycholinguistic research on the emotions of bilinguals, a series of experiments...

The article reviews the conceptual foundations of advertising polysemy ndash; the occurrence of different interpretations for the same advertising message. We discuss how disciplines as diverse as psychology, semiotics and literary theory have dealt with the issue of polysemy, and provide...