Cultural Agenda Setting: Salient Attributes in the Cultural Domain Philemon Bantimaroudis Department of Cultural Technology and Communication, University of the Aegean, Mytilene, Greece Stelios C. Zyglidopoulos Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK ABSTRACT In this paper, we propose that agenda-setting the- ory also applies in the cultural domain of human activities. We argue that because cultural goods have high levels of relevance and uncertainty, their potential consumers will experience a high Need for Orientation (NFO), which will make them seek information in the news media, just like they do when faced with an NFO in the political domain. Moreover, we expect that agenda-setting theory would apply in the cultural domain in a more fragmented manner and that within the cultural domain it would apply differently in various cul- tural sub-domains. To build our argument, we draw from media, cultural studies and marketing literatures. Corporate Reputation Review (2014) 17, 183–194. doi:10.1057/crr.2014.8 KEYWORDS: cultural agenda setting; cultural goods; Need for Orientation; relevance; salience; uncertainty INTRODUCTION In the past 40 years, following the work of McCombs and Shaw (1972), who argued that, by attributing salience to a particular issue, the media signifies its importance in the public mind, a great number of researchers have investigated and found evidence in support of the transfer of salience from the media to the public. Agenda-setting propo- nents have argued and have found evidence for their position that the public pays atten- tion to those political issues that receive high levels of attention in the media – first-level agenda setting (McCombs and Shaw, 1972; Funkhouser, 1973) – and that the public tends to attribute greater importance to particular frames/attributes of those issues that receive attention in the media – second-level agenda setting (Ghanem, 1997; McCombs et al., 2000; McCombs and Ghanem, 2001). According to Carroll and McCombs (2003), more than 300 studies have found that agenda-setting theory applies in the political domain of human activity, and more recently, agenda-setting theory has been utilized within the business domain (Carroll and McCombs, 2003; Carroll, 2010). In this paper, we extend agenda-setting theory further by arguing that in addition to the political and business domains, it also applies in the cultural domain of human activity, even though it does so in a more fragmented manner. According to McCombs (2004), the main reason why agenda-setting Corporate Reputation Review, Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 183–194 © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1363-3589 Corporate Reputation Review Volume 17 Number 3 www.palgrave-journals.com/crr/