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

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2008 in the subject Communications - Public Relations Advertising Marketing Social Media grade: 13 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