6. Results and Analysis
6.1. Hypothesis Testing
6.1.4. H4: The closer relationship the respondent has to an accent, the more favourably a commercial in
In order to investigate whether consumers are more favorable towards a brand if commercials are in an accent the consumer has a stronger relationship to, the following hypothesis was tested:
H4: The closer relationship the respondent has to an accent, the more favourably a commercial in this accent will be rated
Note that this hypothesis was only tested for the accents and not for languages, for reasons explained in Section 3.4.
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To test this hypothesis, it was necessary to find proxies for both favourability and accent relationship.
What is a favourable judgement is in many ways subjective. For example, it cannot be determined whether a brand being more rugged makes it more or less favoured. In this study, however, Likability is considered the best proxy of how favourable the respondents are towards a certain accent in the commercial. Finding a good proxy for relationship strength was harder. It was preferred not to ask the respondents of this directly, partly because it could yield very arbitrary results depending on how the respondents interpret the question. Instead three other proxies were decided upon, which all indicate how exposed a respondent has previously been to a certain accent. The three proxies are; how many times the respondent has visited the country in question, how often the respondent watch any type of media in the different accents and what accent the respondent herself speaks.
The first relationship, i.e. likability and number of visits, was tested using Kendall’s rank order correlation.
It turns out that there is no correlation between the number of visits to a country and how much someone likes a brand when the commercial is in this accent (e.g. visit USA and watch the American commercial).
The second relationship, i.e. likability and exposure to media in a particular accent, was also tested using Kendall’s rank order correlation. Neither here a relationship could be discovered. That means there is no correlation between how often someone is exposed to media in a certain accent (e.g. American) and how much someone likes a brand when the commercial is in this same accent.
The last relationship, i.e. likability and accent spoken by oneself, was tested using a Kruskal-Wallis one-way ANOVA. The reason for using another test for this relationship (compared to the visits and media relationships) was only that this was not a test of correlation, but an “either-or” test. This means that either respondents rate the commercial more favourably if the accents matched – or they do not. The results show that there is a relationship on a 10% significance level (p=0.061). That means that there is support for people actually rating a commercial more favourably if it is in the same accent as the person herself speaks. However, there were only 90 respondents who spoke the same accent as the person in the commercial they watched. This is a frequency of 10 respondents below the desired sample size in this study.
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Overall, there are ambiguous results and it is unclear whether or not H4 can be accepted. The results could be an actual and solid outcome, or they could be the consequence of inaccurate proxies for either favourability or relationship strength. Because of the ambiguity, and because the only significant result is both from a smaller sample than desired and only significant on a 10% level, it is decided that the result should be interpreted conservatively. An overview of the results can be found in Table 10.
Table 10. Display of accent relationship’s effect on likability
Conclusion: H4 is not supported, since there is little evidence for correlation between the respondent's relationship to an accent and its ratings of a commercial in this accent. A presentation of the results can be found in Table 10.
Analysis H4
According to Tajfel’s Social Identity Theory (DeShields & de los Santos, 2000) and Cialdini (2010), a person who identifies with a spokesperson should rate him/her favourably, meaning that a stronger relationship with for example an accent should lead to a more positive evaluation. Even though the research is based on evaluation of a spokesperson, and not a brand, the same logic could likely be applied in this study since both brands and humans can possess personality traits (Aaker, 1997). Hence, the results contradicts the implications from previous research. There are a couple of possible explanations to this, which will be explained below.
CORRELATION BETWEEN FAVORABILITY OF AND RELATIONSHIP TO AN ACCENT
TYPE OF RELATIONSHIP SIGN. DIFFERENCE
Increasing no. of visits to country →increased likability Increasing no. of media exposures →increasing likability Speak same accent as in commercial →more likable
Significant correlation No significant correlation
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One explanation could be that the result of this study are robust and address possible gaps or exceptions in the Social Identity Theory. It could for example be that the associations with a certain accent, in contradiction to what previous research claims, is not affected to a great extent by people’s relationship to it. This would mean that the comparison (from Tajfel’s categorize-identify-compare) between oneself and the categorized object (i.e. the brand) is not dependent on spokesperson’s accent. It could also be that factors other than relationship strength are more powerful indicators of brand likability. For example, a person might value brand personality more, and identify with an accent that generate associations in accordance with one's own personality, rather than identifying with the accent one for some reason has the strongest relationship to. If replicating this research, it is recommended to ask the respondent what (s)he values more when forming a perception of a brand.
Another explanation could be that the proxies used in this research do not truly reflect a person's relationship towards an accent. In what accent a person usually watch TV series, movies, etc. does not necessarily reflect his/her group belonging or personality. It might simply be that the media content a person consumes is not an indicator of what that person identifies with. Because at the end of the day, the SIT, as well as the theory on in-group/outgroup theory, assumes some kind of self-identification and benchmarking towards an outside object (DeShields & de los Santos, 2000; Heding et al., 2016). In future research, it is recommended to conduct further analysis on what questions best measure relationship strength towards an accent. So how could one measure relationship strength more accurately? One good, but difficult way of testing a person’s relationship towards an accent could be to perform a personality analysis of the respondents in order to identify in-group/outgroup beliefs and behaviours. Another, more simple, but potentially less accurate, way would be to ask respondents to self-rate their relationship strength towards an accent.
All results are, however, not insignificant. In fact, the increased likelihood of liking the commercial if it is in the same accent as oneself speak, could be the result that has the strongest support in previous literature. Bruce (2010) has shown that members of the Swedish population think highly of their personal accents and judge people with the same accent more favourably. Moreover, Birch and McPhail’s (1999) show in their research that people rate spokespersons from their own country more favourably. So on this matter, the results of this study supports previous research.
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