The Effects of Consumer Ethnocentrism and Consumer Animosity on the Willingness to Buy with the Mediating Role of Products Judgments: Children's Food Case

Abstract

With the growth of international business and travel, Vietnamese consumers are increasingly confronted with foreign products and services especially children's foods. However, some negative attitudes towards foreign products can arise from several factors such as historic or ongoing political, military, economic, or diplomatic events. Thus, both consumer ethnocentrism and consumer animosity have become important constructs in marketing. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether consumer ethnocentrism and consumer animosity affect Willingness to buy towards Chinese Children's foods and whether this impact is mediated by products judgments. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data collected from 846 personal interviews carried out in three Vietnamese cities (Hanoi, Danang, and Ho Chi Minh). The findings of the research indicate that consumer ethnocentrism increases consumer animosity. The present study also denotes that both consumer ethnocentrism and animosity have a negative impact on Willingness to buy toward Chinese children's foods. Product judgments may not be an important mediating factor between consumers' animosity -Willingness to buy and between consumer ethnocentrism -Willingness to buy toward Chinese Children's foods.

Consumer Perception: Animosity, Ethnocentrism and Willingness to Buy Chinese Products

“…Altogether, 385 questionnaires were randomly distributed to the target respondents. The questionnaire was adopted and modified from a study by Quang, DinhChien and Long (2017) in Vietnam. A scale with about 38 items developed from the literature was subjected to a pretest to check on its suitability.…”

“…Shimp and Sharma (1987) define consumer ethnocentrism as the beliefs held by consumers about the appropriateness, indeed morality, of purchasing foreign made products. Quang et al (2017) posit that ethnocentrism is about judging other peoples culture based on of one's own culture. It is therefore about one's cultural superiority leading to negative evaluations on anything that does not align to one's culture.…”

“…Consumers with high levels of animosity and ethnocentrism will negatively judge foreign n based products and thus affect the willingness to buy. According to Quang et al (2017), most literature indicate a positive relationship between consumer ethnocentrism and judgment of domestic products, and a negative association between consumer ethnocentrism and imported products judgment. Antipathy towards a country is likely to translate into a refusal to buy products originating from such a country, irrespective of judgments on product quality.…”

“…Animosity towards a specific nation affected foreign product purchasing behavior regardless of its relation to consumer's beliefs about the quality of the products from that country . In a study by Quang et al (2017), they found that consumer ethnocentrism had a significant and negative impact on willingness to buy. On the other hand, consumer war and economic animosity had a significant and negative impact on willingness to buy.…”

The effect of consumers’ ethnocentric attitudes on their willingness for prosumption

“…For example, some authors write about individual attitudes such as xenophobia and conservatism which are rather negative feelings (Altintaş and Tokol, 2007) and consider them as the main reasons behind ethnocentrism. However, there are many studies showing that consumer ethnocentrism results from positive emotions and feelings like social responsibility (Misra et al., 2018), patriotism (Pentz et al., 2017; Cazacu, 2016), willingness to support domestic offerors (Quang et al., 2017), etc.…”