Eastern aesthetics in advertising: the role of traditional cultural harmony imagery in brand communication

Traditional culture has become a salient symbolic resource in contemporary Chinese advertising, yet evidence remains limited on whether and how traditional value oriented imagery in advertising texts shapes consumer responses. Drawing on cultural embeddedness theory, this research introduces Traditional Cultural Harmony Imagery (TCHI), the extent to which advertising texts evoke harmony-oriented traditional meanings through identifiable linguistic cues, and examines its effects on brand attitudes and purchase intentions. Across three experimental studies (N = 521) using multiple product categories and operationalizations, embedding TCHI in advertising texts systematically enhances brand attitudes and purchase intentions, even after controlling for demographics, prior cultural exposure, and cultural orientation. Both explicit and implicit TCHI cues outperform non-TCHI texts, while explicitness provides no additional benefit. Parallel mediation analyses show that TCHI increases brand attitudes and purchase intentions via subjective norms and brand cultural identification, indicating socially and culturally grounded pathways. These findings operationalize a text based cultural meaning cue and suggest that in the intelligent era characterized by increasingly standardized content, harmony oriented cultural meaning cues can remain effective resources for strengthening consumer responses.