Study Of Chinese Consumer Product Brands' Strategy Of Penetrating Overseas Market With National Cultural Elements

Last 35 years saw the fast developed Chinese economy,whose manufacturing output and total export-import volume has ranked among the world's top.Although China has come up to the second place in the world in terms of economic aggregate,its enterprises and product brands fall behind in terms of brand power in the world.As a late comer in international market,the comprehensive strength of Chinese enterprises is still weak and they still suffer from negative county-of-origin effect.However,some advanced industrial enterprises and electronic consumer product enterprises have progressed a lot after more than 20 years' internationalization,improving their technical and innovative strengths.Consumer product brands like Herborist and Franz have successfully exploited overseas market with national cultural elements.This phenomenon brings hope to those Chinese consumer product brands that have international or global vision.By far,researches regarding consumer product enterprises' building international brands with cultural elements are still rare.This strategy is called as "consumer culture positioning"in the literature.When Chinese brands utilize national cultural elements to penetrate host country markets with exotic characteristics,they adopt"foreign consumer culture positioning" indeed.Reviewing the literature,it is found that "brand cultural iconness" matches the "consumer culture positioning" well and directly.Therefore,the brands' exoticness perceived by host country consumers can be refined as "brand foreign cultural iconness".Disclosing the path and principle of Chinese brands' taking foreign consumer culture positioning to penetrate host country markets with its foreign cultural iconness has both theoretical and practical merits.Therefore,this study treats Chinese brands that successfully adopt foreign consumer culture positioning in international marketing as the study objects and develops two sub studies from brand and consumer perspectives respectively.The first sub study is a multiple case study,which intends to explore the process of Chinese brands' utilizing foreign consumer culture positioning to penetrate host country markets.By adopting desk research,enterprise visits,brand manager semi-structured interviews,foreign consumer focus groups interviews,the first sub study collects a lot of data which demonstrates every detail of how the sample brands successfully use foreign consumer culture positioning strategy.Based on this data,the study reasons the precondition of using this positioning strategy,key tactics in designing and implementing the strategy,as well as the factor which influences the effectiveness of the strategy.Parts of the findings in the first sub study provide the base for the second sub study.The second sub study is a consumer survey study,which intends to explore how perceived brand foreign cultural iconness influences consumer brand attitude when Chinese brands successfully adopt foreign consumer culture positioning overseas.Based on the signaling theory,self-construal theory,belief-attitude-behavior model,previous research findings,as well as findings in foreign consumer focus group interviews,the second sub study infers that brand foreign cultural iconness may positively influence the perceived brand functional and symbolic benefits,these perceived brand benefits may positively influence brand attitude and then purchase likelihood.Besides,the study infers that brand characteristic(brand origin image)and consumer characteristics(consumer ethnocentrism and consumer culture openness)may moderate the effect of brand foreign cultural iconness.By adopting foreign consumer focus group interviews and overseas consumer online survey,the second sub study makes certain of its sample brands choice.Then,the study collects consumer data in France and Singapore to test research hypotheses.The analysis of structural equation model supports most of the hypotheses.By integrating the results of two sub studies,this study concludes following main findings:Firstly,there are preconditions for brands' adopting foreign consumer culture positioning.Branded products need to have high environmental sensitiveness and cater to global consumers' mainstream preferences.The relevance of product needs to its cultural background offers the opportunity for brands to manipulate their exotic characteristics.Only when the products match the mainstream market trends,can the positioning strategy works.Secondly,the design of foreign consumer culture positioning strategy involves the process of relating the brand itself to host country consumers' perceived specific foreign culture,which indeed is the process of picturing the foreign cultural iconness for the brands.In this process,brands need to extract unique cultural elements of its home country which match the nature of their products.Besides,the culture icon and value selected by the brands need to enjoy high degree of fame and recognition worldwide.Only when the brands bear suitable and reputable cultural elements,can brand foreign cultural iconness make differences.Thirdly,the implementation of foreign consumer culture positioning strategy involves the process of implementing marketing mix to communicate the brand foreign iconness to consumers in host countries.In this process,brands should value the local needs,adjusting marketing mix moderately while maintaining the brands'exoticness.Besides,brands may cooperate with local enterprises or even merge them to make up their own weakness and better utilize brand foreign cultural iconness.Fourthly,brand foreign cultural iconness can positively influence consumer brand attitude and purchase likelihood through influencing their perceived brand functional and symbolic benefits.More specifically,brand foreign cultural iconness can significantly and positively influence consumers' perceived brand quality,prestige,uniqueness benefit and the benefit of belonging to the global citizen group.Besides,in France where the cultural distance is far from China,the influence of brand foreign cultural iconness on perceived brand uniqueness benefit is relatively more salient.Moreover,brand quality,prestige and uniqueness benefit can significantly and positively influence consumer brand attitude while the later can significantly and positively influence purchase likelihood.However,in France where is a developed country and in Singapore where is an imported products dependent country,the brand benefit of belonging to the global citizen group cannot significantly influence consumer brand attitude.Overall,the influence of brand foreign cultural iconness on brand attitude mainly comes from the perceived quality and prestige paths.Fifthly,brand origin limage perccption can significantly and positivel)moderate the total effect of brand foreign cultural iconness on brand attitude.Only in France,can consumer ethnocentrism significantly and negatively moderate the effect of brand foreign cultural iconness.Consumer culture openness can significantly and positively moderate the effect of brand foreign cultural iconness.Although there are limits in this study,it can still make significant theoretical contribution.Firstly,it can enrich the literature regarding consumer culture positioning.Past researches have mostly investigated the global consumer culture positioning and local consumer culture positioning.Studying the phenomenon of Chinese brands' taking advantage of their national cultural elements in international marketing provides new knowledge to the foreign consumer culture positioning literature.Secondly,this study can enrich the literature regarding brand cultural iconness.It provides knowledge regarding a new kind of brand cultural iconness,brand foreign cultural iconness.This study finds out that as same as perceived brand globalness and brand local cultural iconness,brand foreign cultural iconness can stimulate consumers' positive perception of brand benefits and then influence brand attitude as well as purchase likelihood.Specifically,it can positively influence consumers'perceived brand uniqueness benefits,where may be its difference to perceived brand globalness and brand local cultural iconness lies in.Thirdly,existing studies regarding Chinese brands' international marketing often treat country-of-origin effect as cut in point,discussing its negative influence on Chinese brands.This study however has verified the feasibility of Chinese consumer product brands' using cultural advantages to exploit overseas markets and has investigated how and why this strategy works.This brings new angle to the international marketing research of Chinese brands.Findings in this study may help Chinese and other emerging market consumer product brands that are suitable to use foreign consumer culture positioning strategy to penetrate host countries.