Global Popularity of Television Program Types

A critical logic of the globalization process is the efficiency that obtains from producing the same homogeneous products that can be marketed and sold in much the same way everywhere around the world.  Obviously, one cannot presume that one can thrust just any product at anyone, unless there is some degree of interest and appeal.  Among global products, television programs are highly visible, by definition.  Television programs are expensive to create and produce but once completed, the product can be distributed at low cost with each additional sale entailing only the cost of making a copy.  

In this article, we address the question as to how popular certain types of television programs are in different countries of the world.  If each country favors their own idiosyncratic local products, then global products will face unfavorable entry conditions.  If each country favors more or less the same types of programs, then global products can take advantage of their economy of scale to gain universal access.

We will be referring to some survey data from the TGI (Target Group Index) family of consumer studies.  The studies here are the TGI Brasil study of 5,312 persons in Brazil, the TGI Mexico study of 6,200 persons in Mexico, the MARS study of 22,097 persons in the USA, the PMB study of 29,487 persons in Canada and the ACR study of 8,853 persons in Japan.  All are large-sample surveys of consumers.  Within these studies, the respondents are asked about their viewing habits to various types of television programs.  Reflecting different local conditions, the lists of television programs are not the same.  Thus, in Latin America, we asked about telenovelas which do not exist in the USA, Canada or Japan.   Conversely, sumo wrestling and samurai drama do not exist outside of Japan.  We also note the high popularity of travel programs in Japan, where it is socially habitual to travel overseas.

In the following table, we show the most frequently watched television program types in ascending order, separately by country.  There is some universal commonality, as in the presence of news and movies near the top in every country.  But there is an important difference between movies and news programs.  Most countries do not have a sufficiently large movie industry to maintain continuous supply of high-quality domestic movies for television.  Instead, most movies that appear on television will be imported from the USA.  Even in the case of Japan, which has a significant domestic movie industry, foreign movies are much popular than Japanese movies (53% vs. 20%).  By contrast, all of these countries have strong local television news organizations.  The global news television programs will typically garner only small ratings in each country, but their strength will be their ability to accumulate an elite audience across wide geographies.

MOST FREQUENTLY WATCHED TELEVISION PROGRAM TYPES

Differences in audience receptivity across countries are due to cultural differences.  One of the most important factors in cultural formation is the gender role.  We will not engage in the discussion on whether gender roles are natural or socially learned.  In the next table, we show the gender differences for these television programs.  For each program type, we had previously shown the overall incidences.  We now calculate the incidence among females and then we construct an index that is defined as 100 times the female incidence divided by the total incidence.  An index of 100 means that the females have the same incidence as the total population.  An index of less than 100 means that females watch less, and an index of more than 100 means that females watch more.  In the table below, we show these incidences and we have colored all indices greater than 100 in red and all incidences less than 100 in blue.

From this table, we observe some universal tendencies.  Under whatever name, telenovelas/soap opera/serial drama/family drama will skew towards females, whereas sports programs will skew towards males.  News programs and movies are usually near 50%/50%; after all, it is impossible to build a high overall incidence while being highly segmented by gender.

FEMALE INDICES OF MOST FREQUENTLY WATCHED TELEVISION PROGRAMS

 (posted by Roland Soong, 01/19/2003)