An Empirical Study of Consumer Ethnocentrism, Consumer Disidentification and Xenophilia, and Their Impact on Contemporary Consumers

Abstrakt

The study investigates concepts relating to attitudes towards domestic products and attraction to the foreign with the objectives to understand how they interplay and impact contemporary consumers. Specifically, the research was conducted on the concepts of consumer ethnocentrism, consumer disidentification and xenophilia. Despite the increasing globalisation and ethnically diverse consumer markets (Shoham, Segev & Gavish, 2017), it was found that limited research had been conducted on the concept of consumer disidentification in an American context, while the research on xenophilia had been sparsely researched in general. Based on the background information, seven hypotheses were developed to provide a coherent understanding of the topics. The empirical data was gathered through a questionnaire published on the online crowdsourcing website MTurk. The study was applied to the population of the United States, and responses from 300 participants were collected. Based on the findings from the quantitative analysis, it was found that perceived consumer ethnocentrism does not affect other individuals levels of consumer disidentification. Yet, consumer disidentification can predict increased levels of xenophilia. Moreover, the results support that xenophilia can predict consumers consumption of global brands, willingness to move abroad and shop online. It also confirmed that consumer disidentification is negatively related to individuals' use of Facebook. However, the initial test of consumer disidentifications effect on participation in the sharing economy revealed a low significance level. Yet, in a second analysis with added numbers of respondents, the results showed a positive correlation between the variables. Lastly, the thesis has contributed to significant implications for scholars and marketing managers both on a domestic and global level while drawing attention to interesting undiscovered topics to be further researched.