Dataset for content analysis published in "Hornikx, J., Meurs, F. van, Janssen, A., & Heuvel, J. van den (2020). How brands highlight country of origin in magazine advertising: A content analysis. Journal of Global Marketing, 33 (1), 34-45."

*Abstract (taken from publication) Aichner (2014) proposes a classification of ways in which brands communicate their country of origin (COO). The current, exploratory study is the first to empirically investigate the frequency with which brands employ such COO markers in magazine advertisements. An analysis of about 750 ads from the British, Dutch, and Spanish editions of Cosmopolitan showed that the prototypical ‘made in’ marker was rarely used, and that ‘COO embedded in company name’ and ‘use of COO language’ were most frequently employed. In all, 36% of the total number of ads contained at least one COO marker, underlining the importance of the COO construct.

*Methodology (taken from publication)

Sample The use of COO markers in advertising was examined in print advertisements from three different countries to increase the robustness of the findings. Given the exploratory nature of this study, two practical selection criteria guided our country choice: the three countries included both smaller and larger countries in Europe, and they represented languages that the team was familiar with in order to reliably code the advertisements on the relevant variables. The three European countries selected were the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The dataset for the UK was discarded for testing H1 about the use of English as a foreign language, as will be explained in more detail in the coding procedure.

The magazine Cosmopolitan was chosen as the source of advertisements. The choice for one specific magazine title reduces the generalizability of the findings (i.e., limited to the corresponding products and target consumers), but this magazine was chosen intentionally because an informal analysis suggested that it carried advertising for a large number of product categories that are considered ethnic products, such as cosmetics, watches, and shoes (Usunier & Cestre, 2007). This suggestion was corroborated in the main analysis: the majority of the ads in the corpus referred to a product that Usunier and Cestre (2007) classify as ethnic products. Table 2 provides a description of the product categories and brands referred to in the advertisements. Ethnic products have a prototypical COO in the minds of consumers (e.g., cosmetics – France), which makes it likely that the COOs are highlighted through the use of COO markers.

Cosmopolitan is an international magazine that has different local editions in the three countries. The magazine, which is targeted at younger women (18–35 years old), reaches more than three million young women per month through its online, social and print platforms in the Netherlands (Hearst Netherlands, 2016), has about 517,000 readers per month in Spain (PrNoticias, 2016) and about 1.18 million readers per month in the UK (Hearst Magazine U.K., 2016).

The sample consisted of all advertisements from all monthly issues that appeared in 2016 in the three countries. This whole-year cluster was selected so as to prevent potential seasonal influences (Neuendorf, 2002). In total, the corpus consisted of 745 advertisements, of which 111 were from the Dutch, 367 from the British and 267 from the Spanish Cosmopolitan. Two categories of ads were excluded in the selection process: (1) advertisements for subscription to Cosmopolitan itself, and (2) advertisements that were identical to ads that had appeared in another issue in one of the three countries. As a result, each advertisement was unique.

Coding procedure For all advertisements, four variables were coded: product type, presence of types of COO markers, COO referred to, and the use of English as a COO marker. In the first place, product type was assessed by the two coders. Coders classified each product to one of the 32 product types. In order to assess the reliability of the codings, ten per cent of the ads were independently coded by a second coder. The interrater reliability of the variable product category was good (κ = .97, p < .000, 97.33% agreement between both coders). Table 2 lists the most frequent product types; the label ‘other’ covers 17 types of product, including charity, education, and furniture.

In the second place, it was recorded whether one or more of the COO markers occurred in a given ad. In the third place, if a marker was identified, it was assessed to which COO the markers referred. Table 1 lists the nine possible COO markers defined by Aichner (2014) and the COOs referred to, with examples taken from the current content analysis. The interrater reliability for the type of COO marker was very good (κ = .80, p < .000, 96.30% agreement between the coders), and the interrater reliability for COO referred to was excellent (κ = 1.00, p < .000).

After the independent assessments of the two coders, the coders decided on the best coding for all cases for which they made a different initial choice. On the basis of these resulting codings, the fourth and final variable was assessed: the English language as a COO marker. Only if an ad contained the English language and at least one other type of COO marker referring to an English-speaking country, was the English language coded as a true COO marker. An example is a Dutch ad using the English language and featuring a British model. If, as in most cases, an ad contained the English language but no other marker was found that referred to an English-speaking country, the English language was not considered to be a COO marker but a marker of globalness (e.g., ‘Because sometimes, a girl’s gotta walk’ in an ad for Skechers in the Spanish corpus). This procedure to disentangle the English language as a true COO marker and a marker of globalness was only followed in the Dutch and Spanish sample. In the UK sample, the English language was not considered to be either a COO marker or a marker of globalness since English is the first language of the UK. Similarly, neither the Dutch language in the Dutch sample nor the Spanish language in the Spanish sample were considered COO markers since these languages are both countries’ first language.

Statistical treatment For all research questions and the hypothesis, descriptive statistics were generated presenting frequencies and percentages of the categories that were compared. The first analysis (RQ1) concerned the frequency with which the different types of COO marker were used in the sample from the three different countries. For each COO marker, it was determined whether or not it occurred in each of the ads in the sample. In order to statistically test whether some types of COO marker occur more frequently than others (RQ2a), a within-subject ANOVA was conducted with Type of COO marker as independent variable, with nine levels representing the nine different COO markers classified by Aichner (2014). For RQ2b, RQ2c, and H1, frequencies were compared for the occurrence of the different categories within one variable under investigation. For RQ2c, for instance, the variable was the number of COO markers referred to in an ad; the different categories were ‘no marker’, ‘two markers’, ‘three markers’, and ‘four markers’. Non-parametric 2 tests were conducted for the research questions and the hypothesis to test for potentially significant differences between the occurrence of the categories.