Be shocked. The effect of shock advertising on German citizens and Italians living in Germany - Jennifer Monz - Bog

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2008 in the subject Communications - Public Relations, Advertising, Marketing, Social Media, grade: 1,3, Heidelberg International Business Academy, language: English, abstract: In 2007, the Dolce and Gabbana print advertisement campaign triggered different reactions in Germany. Some ethnic entities, such as Italian citizens tended to react intensely to the provocative advertising, in their country of origin there were even grave protests against Dolce and Gabbana.

German citizens however did not seem to be impacted in such an intense way. This seems to be due to the fact that the basic elements of culture, which are social structure, language, communication, religion and values and attitudes differ between ethnic entities. Moreover these different norms and values are affected by the affiliation of a collective, signifying that within an ethnic entity, Italian citizens, who live in Germany, norms and values of individuals are similar. In particular the elements religion, values and attitudes seem to be of crucial importance as Dahl et al. (2003:269) state that ¿shocking advertising content is that which attempts to surprise an audience by deliberately violating norms for societal values and personal ideals¿.

In order to examine how effective shock advertisement is applied on Germans and Italians in Germany a literature review on shock advertisement and the respective culture was conducted. The outcome of the literature review are several hypotheses, which were verified or confuted respectively. Therefore primary data was quantitatively, through questionnaires, and qualitatively, through semi-structured interviews, collected. This led to pivotal findings and conclusions, which are ascribable to cultural differences of Germans and Italians.

The conclusion and findings of this research might be crucial for organisations and companies, which do not intend to communicate exclusively to their standard target group, Germans, but also to an ethnic minority, Italians, in Germany. This ethnic minority seems to be crucial for the German domestic market as in 2004 an average net wage of 1470 ¿ per month was reached, consequently this target group features a considerable purchasing power, which can only be capitalized if this target group is advertised adequately, taking into account cultural particularities.