The effects of vocal pitch and foreign accent (Chinese-accented English) for congruent and incogruent products in radio advertising

Accents and vocal pitch are essential components of advertising because they convey certain meanings. Although there has been research done in the area, none has given attention to the combinatorial effects of vocal pitch and foreign accents. This research seeks to understand if the certain combination of pitch and accent-based congruency can improve purchase intention, attitude towards the product, authenticity, and attitude towards the advertisement. Using a 2 (low pitch, high pitch) X 3 (congruent, moderately incongruent products) between-subject experimental design, a total of 150 monolingual native Australian English consumers were exposed to a radio advertisement and their responses were gauged. The results indicated that there was a significant main effect for the accent-based congruency, that is, a Cinese-accented English speaker advertising the congruent product (Chinese restaurant) is more effective than a Chinese-accented English speaker advertising incongruent products (Indian and Australian restaurants). The results of the study also confirm the main effect for pitch although not as strong as the accent-congruency effect. This implies that a speaker with low-pitched voice leads listeners to form a more favourable and positive advertising effect than a speaker with a high-pitched voice. However, this study did not discover any significant interaction effect between accent-congruency and pitch.