Consumer Ethnocentrism and Attitudes

toward Domestic and Foreign Products

SUMMARISED BY

NIRAJ KUMAR ROY (09231)

SEC- A

Ethnocentrism is the consumers’ likelihood to accept or reject foreign made products. The
article talks about the relation between consumers’ ethnocentrism and preferences for products
from culturally similar countries by examining their attitudes toward foreign manufactured
products in product categories in which domestic alternatives are not available. In relation to this,
a study has been conducted by the authors in the context of New Zealand customers and to
categories countries as culturally similar or dissimilar to New Zealand, Schwartz’s cultural level
value theory has been used. The product categories that have been taken into study are television
and cameras which are manufactured in U.S.A. and Germany which are the most culturally
similar countries. These products are not available in the domestic market of New Zealand.
Whereas, to find out the level of loyalty for their own country made products in comparison to
culturally similar countries, such as U.S.A. and Germany and culturally dissimilar countries like
Singapore and Italy, the study has been conducted on refrigerators. It also further states that how
the consumer ethnocentrism results in an overestimation of the attributes and overall quality of
domestic products and an underestimation of the quality of foreign products.

To measure the level of ethnocentrism, CETSCALE has been used. There is also a possibility of
biasness in the study, as the ethnocentrism may vary from a person to person on the basis of
demographic factors such as age and education level. The sample size consists of one thousand
respondents over the age of eighteen years. The level of cultural similarity has been determined
on the basis of Schwartz’s listing of countries, according to which, U.S.A. and Germany are
considered as the most culturally similar and Singapore and Italy as the most culturally dissimilar
countries with respect to New Zealand. The willingness to buy product from each category has
been measured on semantic scale and to find out the degree of consistency and significant
differences between all possible hypotheses, Cronach’s alpha coefficients are calculated and t-
test has been done respectively.

As the result of the study, individuals with high levels of consumer ethnocentrism have been
found to have more favorable attitude towards and more willingness to purchase products
imported from culturally similar countries than products from culturally dissimilar countries. The
loyalty towards the country made product can also be observed by the fact that some of the
respondents are found to compromise on the quality and attributes of the products but not on
their ethnocentric attitude.

These results suggest that cultural similarity is an important consideration for highly ethnocentric
consumers in the evaluation of foreign products, which further provides a reason to have a
greater competition between the foreign goods and domestic alternatives available. This
competition becomes more intense when the consumer ethnocentrism level reaches to that level
where the consumers are ready to buy less quality domestic products in comparison to superior
foreign alternatives to the products. Hence to combat with this situation, the author propose that
foreign products should be priced slightly lower than domestic products, if all other product
attributes are similar as it will help the company to attract less ethnocentric segment of market.

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