The Handbook of International Advertising Research

Preface

Hong Cheng

The past few decades witnessed increasing scholarly interest, effort, and advancement in international advertising¹ research (La Ferle & Lee, 2012; Miracle, 1984; Moriarty & Duncan, 1990; Taylor, 2005; Taylor, Okazaki, & Mueller, 2012; Zinkhan, 1994). The number of articles published in leading academic journals (Taylor, 2005; Zou, 2005) and papers presented at major academic conferences in advertising, communication, and marketing, for example, have been obviously growing.

Nevertheless, the need for “more programmatic and systematic research” (Taylor, 2005, p. 10) on international advertising is much more urgent and appealing than ever before. The reason for this need is twofold: As a major driving force of globalization (Frith & Mueller, 2010), international advertising is becoming ubiquitous in many parts of the world today. Its practice and impact undoubtedly warrant more scholarly investigations. In the meantime, however, international advertising research is still underdeveloped in terms of theories and methodological approaches. These issues were pointed out by Miracle (1984) three decades ago, addressed by Taylor (2005) several years ago, and continuously echoed upon by other scholars (e.g., La Ferle & Lee, 2012; Taylor et al., 2012) today, partly because “many international studies [on advertising] started from scratch, ignoring advances made by other studies” (Taylor, 2005, p. 8).

This handbook addresses the gap between the rapidly growing output of scholarly ...