Many U.S. advertisers have long stressed the need to use the advertising message
to differentiate a brand from its major competitors. This conventional wisdom
has been supported empirically by Stewart and Furse's (1986) study of
more than 1,000 television commercials, which found a positive relationship
between the presence of a brand differentiating message and advertising
effectiveness. The question of whether this important research finding extends
cross-culturally to South Korea is investigated in this article. To this end, an
experiment was conducted in Seoul using selected commercials from a large
content-analyzed database of Korean television advertisements. Results suggest
that brand differentiation can be an effective technique for firms advertising
in Korea.
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