The tendency of customers’ preference to their local brands over the foreign ones is known as consumer ethnocentrism, and it is an important issue in international marketing. This study aims at identifying the behavioral and neural correlates of Consumer Ethnocentrism in the field of brand preference, using event-related potential (ERP). We sampled subjects from two ethnic groups, a Chinese ethnic group and a sub-Saharan Black African group from Zhejiang University. The subjects faced two sequential stimuli, S1 followed by S2. S1 consisted of 40 pictures of 20 Chinese and 20 Black Africans people wearing traditional clothes, and S2 consisted of 40 fake brand-logos which were divided randomly into two groups of 20 each. The subjects were informed that the people in S1 purchased and recommended the products with the brand-logos presented in S2, and the subjects were asked to rate their preference degree toward these logos. The brand-logos were called the “in-group recommended logos” if the recommenders in S1 were the same race as the subjects, otherwise, the “out-group recommended logos.” The results revealed that the race of the brand-logo recommender highly impacted the Chinese subjects’ preference for the brand-logos. The N200 component elicited by the in-group recommended logos were significantly lower than those elicited by the out-group recommended logos. Additionally, there was evidence that being familiar with foreign cultures reduced consumer ethnocentrism. The African subjects were familiar with Chinese people and adopted a Chinese culture, as a result, they did not differ in showing preferences between the in-group and out-group recommended logos.

In business practice, companies prefer to find highly attractive commercial spokesmen to represent and promote their products and brands. This study mainly focused on the investigation of whether female facial attractiveness influenced the preference attitudes of male subjects toward a no-named and unfamiliar logo and determined the underlying reasons via neuroscientific methods. We designed two ERP (event-related potential) experiments. Experiment 1 comprised a formal experiment with facial stimuli. The purpose of experiment 2 was to confirm whether the logos that were used did not present a significant difference for the subjects. According to the behavioural results of experiment 1, when other conditions were not significantly different, the preference degree of the logos correlated with attractive female faces was increased compared with the logos correlated with unattractive faces. Reasons to explain these behavioural phenomena were identified via ERP measures, and preference cross-category transfer mainly caused the results. Additionally, the preference developed associated with emotion. This study is the first to report a novel concept referred to as the “Preference Cross-Category Transfer Effect”. Moreover, a three-phase neural process of the face evaluation subsequently explained how the cross-category transfer of preference occurred and influenced subject preference attitude toward brand logos.