Cross-Cultural Differences in Emotional Response to Destination Commercials

In this paper we examine whether cultural characteristics lead to different emotion expressions whilst watching tourist destination ads via digital media, and thus, ads might be perceived differently depending on the country of origin of the viewer. To test this assumption, participants from two different countries, located on two different continents, Austria/Europe, and Colombia/South America, are exposed to a destination ad. Their faces are recorded and post-processing analysis on the recorded videos using the AFFDEX algorithm, that is capable of inferring emotions based on the facial action coding system (FACS), is conducted. Valence scores are compared among the viewers of the two countries over the time span of the whole commercial, and subpopulation differences of basic emotions (joy, surprise, anger, sadness, disgust, fear, and contempt) are explored using time series clustering along with optimizations for the dynamic time warping (DTW) distance. Screening sequences in this way reveals insight on the emotional reactions of different viewer groups. The findings instruct tourism marketers on how to fit the targeted emotions elicited by tourist destination advertising with various cultural settings.