The Relationship between Values and Appeals in Israeli Advertising: A Smallest Space Analysis

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Abstract
Eight hundred and sixty-one Israeli TV ads, dated from 1995 to 1997, were examined for their value system and their appeal type to determine the relationship of value systems, appeal types and the relative salience of specific value systems. The results verify a combined values-appeal structure that is composed of three distinct classes: rational appeal with functional values, emotional appeal with hedonistic values, and emotional appeal with altruistic values. As expected from studies of advertising in western societies, most of the ads were loaded with either rational-functional characteristics or emotional-hedonistic characteristics. Altruism in its entirety was dominant in only a few of the ads, although one of its signs-collectivism-was surprisingly found in some of the ads that were predominantly hedonistic. Most of the findings support Pollay's conception of advertising as a distorted mirror that refrains from depicting certain values. The work uses Smallest Space Analysis (SSA) to classify the value types, and discusses the use of smallest space analysis as a method for confirmatory multivariate classification in advertising research.