Four types of animosity, the emotional antagonism felt toward a specific entity, were identified as a function of their sources (situational vs. stable) and locus (personal vs. national) of manifestation. A five-country survey was conducted in Asia to validate the typology, using the United States and Japan as target entities. Results affirmed the four-factor structure of the proposed typology. Several cross-national differences in animosity were also uncovered. Indonesians, Malaysians, and Thais tended to have greater situational animosity toward the United States than Japan, except for Koreans and Singaporeans. Not surprisingly, Koreans showed greater stable animosity toward Japan than the United States. Asians also demonstrated a higher level of animosity at the national than personal level. Implications arising from the findings are discussed and directions for future research suggested.

The nature, antecedents, and consequences of consumer animosity during the 1997 Asian economic crisis are investigated, based on a large-scale survey of 2000 adult consumers representative of five affected nations (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, and Thailand). An animosity model was developed and tested with the US and Japan as target countries. As predicted, stable and situational animosity reduced willingness to buy products from a perceived hostile national entity. Affective evaluations and cognitive judgments were negatively influenced by situational animosity but not by stable animosity. As expected, situational animosity was increased by external attribution, perceived external control, and stable animosity. Implications of these findings are discussed, and directions for future research suggested. Journal of International Business Studies (2008) 39, 996–1009. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8400392

This paper presents the findings of a survey through the use of a structured questionnaire of over 240 visitors from China to Singapore in February 2003. The main objective is to determine if these tourists could be effectively segmented based on their motivations for travel. The analysis of the survey data confirmed that they could be clustered into four main segments. Each of the segments was found to possess unique profiles in terms of demographic background, trip-related characteristics and personal values. The segments were also assessed of their levels of satisfaction with various attributes offered by Singapore as a tourist destination. In addition, their overall satisfaction, likelihood of revisit and likelihood of making positive word-ofmouth recommendation to others were also determined. In all of these, the segments were found to differ significantly from each other. Finally, the implications of these findings were discussed and suggestions made as to how Singapore could effectively develop marketing strategies to attract these tourists, bearing in mind that China was the third largest tourist generating country for Singapore and they collectively contributed over S$300 million to the n Singapore, the tourism industry contributes around US$10 billion annually to the economy, accounting for 10% of Singapore's gross domestic product, and employing more than 200 000 workers (Toh et al., 2001). Singapore is a popular tourist destination. Times, 2002). Furthermore, statistics from the World Tourism Organization has shown that China has emerged as one of the top 15 tourism spenders in the world as she took the seventh position. In a recent study done on the emerging China's outbound travel market (Zhang and Heung, 2001), the most popular destinations visited by Mainland Chinese were Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia. It is therefore worthwhile for Singapore to expend its marketing efforts to attract visitors from China. To do that, it is crucial to understand the motivations and values of Chinese travellers and measure the extent of their satisfaction with their experience in the visited destination.This article therefore aims to provide a better understanding of the factors motivating visitors from China to Singapore and their levels of satisfaction with different aspects of their experiences in Singapore. Specifically, the motivations of visiting Singapore of these Chinese visitors were determined. Following that, such motivation factors were used to cluster these visitors into various segments. After such segments had been determined, the differences found among the various clusters with regard to their socio-demographic and trip-related characteristics were examined. Finally, the differences in their levels of satisfaction with destination attributes, overall satisfaction, likelihood of revisit and propensity to recommend Singapore to other visitors were investigated. In the concluding section, recommendations are made as to how Singapore can continue to attract visitors from China. R...

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This article aims to examine the online buying behavior among a group of Internet users. Based on a sample of over 3,700 Internet users, this study explores their information‐seeking patterns as well as their motivations and concerns for online shopping. Factor analysis and cluster analysis were used to classify the respondents into six types of online shoppers. Coupled with their demographic information and actual buying behavior, it was possible to constitute a distinct profile for each of the segments. Discriminant analysis was also conducted to seek out the important attitudinal variables that differentiated the various clusters of online shoppers. The implications of such classification are also discussed.