Advertising creativity in China: the moderating effect of cultural uncertainty avoidance on consumers' need for cognitive closure

There is little doubt that creativity is central to advertising practice, yet there is a surprising lack of empirical knowledge around it. Recent research suggests that creativity, in addition to getting advertising noticed, also enhances consumer processing by inducing a desire to postpone closure (DPC) and thus keep an open mind (Smith and Yang). This has significant implications for practice but has yet to be tested against the moderating influence of culture. This paper explores the suggestion that consumers from high uncertainty avoidance (UA) cultures are more reluctant to process highly creative ad messages than their low UA culture counterparts because unpredictable (ie. creative) messages are incongruent with their need for certainty (Choi and Kim). It focuses on China, a nation ranked by Hofstede as high in uncertainty avoidance, but very important as the world's largest and fastest growing consumer market (Chan and Cheng; Okazaki and Mueller; Tse; Niu, Dong and Chen; Yaprak). Discussions with Chinese advertising professionals suggest that Chinese ads are low in creativity because creativity is not valued or understood by clients. Whilst a growing creative confidence is evident in Chinese music and arts, the same cannot be said for advertising practice. It is anticipated that the findings of this research will go some way to informing the manner in which advertising creativity is applied when targeting consumers from different points along the cultural uncertainty avoidance spectrum and may contribute to a greater understanding of the function and value of advertising creativity in China.