Multinational advertising: cross-border and cross-cultural communication

Abstract

Today, globalization is a planetary reality that we cannot escape. In this environment, multinational companies must constantly reinvent themselves to survive and make themselves known to the greatest number of people. To do this, they use advertising, which will give them a unique identity, their goal being to target potential consumers and thus increase their sales. This is where brand transfer and marketing policy come into play. The purpose of this paper will be to determine, through examples of advertising messages from multinational companies, whether, across the political, socio-cultural, and even linguistic borders of the French-speaking area, French-language slogans are standard or simple literal translations, or whether, on the other hand, they adapt by using a transfer of brand identification to target cultures. The stakes are, of course, economic (the relationship between investment in advertising and the benefits in terms of product awareness and sales), but also, from a cross-border perspective, sociocultural (respect for diversity) and possibly sociolinguistic (considering the varieties of French).