A Research On The Motive Mechanism Of Consumers' Temporarily Boycotting Foreign Products

It is not rare that consumers in one country boycott the products from the other countrybecause of their economic, political or military conflict, which happened and happens both in China and abroad. Such sudden conflicts of economy, police, military, or culture between countries grow as further globalization, and affect consumer purchase behavior in the international market. For example, Chinese people hold voluntary parades to oppose Japan and boycott Japanese goods in many Chinese cities during May,2005. And Chinese people boycotted French Carrefour in a lot of cities in April and May,2008. However, nobody has ever studied what factors lead to consumer temporary boycotting behavior against foreign products due to a sudden national conflict and how they work. It is the research question of this thesis.The thesis begins with its research background and goals, concludes the relative literature, analyzes the concept system of patriotism, and reviews the affect-confirmation and conformity theories. Then, it describes, analyzes and sort the phenomena by conducting descriptive researches on boycotting Japanese products and boycotting Carrefour. Based on the above researches, it creates a new construct of Patriotic Emotion. It establishes the hypotheses and designs a structural model to explain the interaction mechanism among patriotic emotion, conformity pressure, and product comparison utility and consumers' boycott behavior, on the basis of the qualitative researches and from the angle of the affect-confirmation and conformity theories. It uses the experiment and survey to test its hypotheses and model, and submits a new judgment-weight hypothesis. Finally, it concludes the research results, proposes some marketing implications accordingly, and tells its theoretical contributions, limitations and future research direction.Its theoretical contributions are as follows:firstly, it creats a new construct of Patriotic Emotion. The previous researches on the moral role of country of origin concentrated on two concepts, Consumer Ethnocentrism and Country Animosity. Its newly-established construct of Patriotic Emotion complements the traditional conceptual system of the moral role of country of origin and specifies the applying scope of each concept. Secondly, it analyzes and verifies the motive mechanism of temporary boycotting foreign products. The study uncovers three main reasons influencing consumers to boycott foreign goods temporarily:Patriotic Emotion, Conformity, and Product Comparative Utility. Thirdly, it establishes a new hypothesis of Judgment Weight. The thesis builds the new hypothesis of Judgment Weight, which includes the social factor ignored by the Affect-Confirmation Theory, based on the Affect-Confirmation Theory and the results of the qualitative and quantitative researches. Fourthly, it discovers a specialty of Chinese market through studying Brand Origin Recognition Accuration (BORA), that firstly product catogary is an important variable to affect Chinese consumers'knowledge of brand origin, and secondly BORA is a moderating variable in boycotting foreign goods temporarily.The features of its research methods:firstly, it employs both an experiment and a survey, a synergy of their virtures, to obtain good internal and external validities. Secondly, it measures the actural purchase behavior of consumers in order to have a nice external validity. It collected the sale data of Japanese brands in the descriptive research on anti-Japan campaign. And it investigated consumers'particular boycott behavior as well as their virtual purchase behavior before anti-Carrefour in the survey about Carrefour. Thirdly, the research was just-in-time. The investigation was conducted synchroniously as people boycotted Carrefour. Therefore, it records their real behavior and thought at that special time and in that special place. This is also the reason why Conformity could be found and measured in the research on anti-Carrefour.The thesis can assist international corporations to manager crisis when consumers boycott foreign products in the home countries. It points out how to reconstruct Chinese products as well.