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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2014

The Grapes of Happiness: Selling Sun-Maid Raisins to the Chinese (1920s-1930s)

Cécile Armand

Résumé

This paper is a connective case study of Sun-Maid Raisins commercial strategies in the United States and China during the interwar years. It explores in three steps how the California-based company used advertising to bridge Chinese and American consumer cultures, less by reducing the gap than by adapting to Chinese consuming habits and purchasing power. After differentiating the universal/peculiar characteristics of consumers and raisins market conditions in the United States and China, we will examine how the specific organization of Sun-Maid in Republican China proved successful. Like British-American Tobacco and other global companies, Sun-Maid relied on its own distribution system, combining raisin imports and locally-made advertising. Last but not least, a close reading of a Sun-Maid advertisement published in 1928 in the Shenbao (one of the most important newspapers in Shanghai) will serve as a starting point to probe into Chinese and American commercial images. Using historical lenses to analyze their main visual and textual elements, we will discuss how Chinese advertisements merged local/global features of visual culture to invent their own versions of the "sex/women appeal" and the "health appeal", which both enjoyed a worldwide popularity at the time.
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Dates et versions

halshs-01575404 , version 1 (19-08-2017)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : halshs-01575404 , version 1

Citer

Cécile Armand. The Grapes of Happiness: Selling Sun-Maid Raisins to the Chinese (1920s-1930s). Advertising and Marketing in China: Chinese-Western Cultural Encounters (19th c.-Present), USF Center for Asia Pacific Studies, University of San Francisco, Nov 2014, San Francisco, United States. ⟨halshs-01575404⟩
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