The Impact Of Consumer Ethnocentrism Tendency On Purchase Intention

Consumer Ethnocentrism Tendency (CET) is an important consumer behavior concept in the context of globalization. It is a stable psychological characteristic that represent the beliefs held by consumers about the appropriateness, indeed morality, of purchasing foreign-made products. Economic globalization makes consumers have more and more choices when shopping. But economic globalization does not necessarily bring about the globalization of consumption. The consumer behavior will be affected by the combined effect of globalization and local culture. Globalization may actually strengthen the influence of local culture, and cause consumer’s resistance to globalization. When faced with the choice of domestic and foreign brands, consumer may set aside the performance, price and other factors of the product. They give more preference and prejudice just because it is domestic or foreign brands. This tendency is more prominent when their groups meet powerful external threats.After China’s opening up, at first the foreign brands, especially developed countries’brands are upscale brand synonymous. Consumer had higher degree of recognition for foreign brands. However, with China’s economic development, the gap between domestic brands and foreign brands gradually narrowed.“Worship”psychological of China’s consumer gradually weakened. At the same time, consumers also affected by local culture and patriotism. These factors will enable consumers to favor domestic products. How about the degree of the favor? Does it actually affect the purchase intention? The answers to these questions have important practical significance for companies and government in developing marketing strategies. The research of Consumer Ethnocentrism Tendency will provide valid reference for above questions.The previous studies of CET can be divided into three main areas. The first is the researches of its antecedent variables including demographic factors, psychosocial factors and so on. The second is discusses of its consequence variables such as purchase intention.The third is the mediator and moderator variables between these relationships. As the purchase intention is the important variable which reflect the consumers’decision, this paper will focus on the impact mechanism of CET and purchase intention to provide effective strategies and policy recommendations. The existing researches about CET largely overlooked the other important variables which also impact on purchase intention. At the same time, there are few studies discuss the impact of CET under certain context. Thus, this paper wouldl address above problem and explore CET’s impact on purchase intention, the impact mechanism and the effect under certain context.First, this paper introduced the model of theory of reasoned action (TRA) to exmine the CET’s ability to predict purchase intention. The theory of reasoned action is an important theoretical framework of predicting purchase intention. This model points out that attitude and subject norm are two important variables which affect consumer purchase intention. This paper expanded the theory of reasoned action by adding CET as the third independent variable to examine whether the consumer ethnocentrism have a significant effect on the purchase intention and improve the model’s explanatory power. The results showed that CET is an effective expansion of the theory of reasoned action (TRA). CET had a significant impact on the purchase intention of products especially the willingness of domestic products.Second, this paper studied CET under the framework of the country-of-origin effect. By the analysis of theoretical studies on country-of-origin, this paper put forward the combined effects mechanism model of product country-of-origin effect and CET on purchase intention. The suvey questionnaire selected Chinese, Japanese and German autos. The results showed that the brand image of country-of origin significantly affected the product attitude, and further affect the purchase intention of the products. And CET had a significant direct impact on purchase intention. Product familiarity moderated the relationship between CET and purchase intention.Finally, this paper studied the moderating effects of demographic variables, CET and conspicuous consumption on the purchase intention under the context of product-harm crisis. The data analysis showed that the damage degree of purchase intention was significantly different with different age, gender, income, CET and conspicuous consumption level. The results indicated that during the foreign product-harm crisis, CET had moderating effect on the purchase intention.This paper carried in-depth study around CET. First, the paper inspected the expansion function of CET for the theory of reasoned action, and verified that CET improved the explanatory ability of purchase intention both of domestic and foreign products. Then the paper examined the combined effect of CET and country-of-origin effect on purchase intention, and verified the moderating effect of product familiarity between CET and purchase intention. Finally, the paper tested empirically the moderating effect of CET on purchase intention during product-harm crisis. The conclusions of study provided effective recommendations for international marketing companies to develop marketing strategies and measures when responding to product-harm crisis.