Multicultural advertising: The impact of consumers’ self-concept clarity and materialism on self-brand connection and communal-brand connection

The purpose of this study is to explore the effect of consumer self-concept clarity and materialism on consumers’ self-brand connection and communal-brand connection as well as purchase intention in the context of ethnically matched, mismatched, or multi-ethnic advertising. The results showed that self-concept clarity has a negative impact on self-brand connection and communal-brand connection for ads featuring multi-ethnic models (but not for ads featuring ethnically matched or mismatched models), while materialism did not exhibit any impact on self-brand connection or communal-brand connection for any of the conditions. A negative relationship between self-concept clarity and materialism was found for the multi-ethnic approach (but not for ads featuring ethnically matched or mismatched models). Marketing practitioners will benefit from these findings by gaining insight on how consumer traits influence consumer-brand relationships in the context of match, mismatch, and multi-ethnic advertising approaches.