Forbrugeretnocentrisme: Et empirisk studie i Danmark

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the degree of consumer ethnocentrism in the Danish market and to find out which influence it has on the consumer behavior. This paper seeks to identify the sociological and cultural factors which are influential when the consumers choose between domestic produced goods and foreign produced goods. We have used the Cetscale which was introduced by Shimp & Sharma (1987) in there article "Consumer Ethnocentrism: Construction and Validation of the Cetscale" to measure the degree of consumer ethnocentrism. A questionnaire made from desk-research was distributed online in order to collect empiric data from the Danish consumers. 287 respondents completed the survey and out of these 265 were usable. The collected data was analyzed via factor analysis, reliability analysis, correlation analysis, t-tests and regression analysis in SPSS. We found that the correlation between consumer ethnocentrism and cultural openness is negative, and the correlation between consumer ethnocentrism and conservatism and patriotism was positive. Age, income and education have an influence on Danish consumer ethnocentrism as well. Older people tend to show more ethnocentric tendencies than young people. High-income consumers tend to evaluate domestic goods products more favorably which are in contrast to other studies similar to ours and more educated people are more likely to favorably evaluate imports. During the study we divided the educational factor into educational level and educational fields and found that the consumers within the field of education that showed the most ethnocentric tendencies was the business educated consumers in Trade & Office. And the field of education that showed the least ethnocentric tendencies was the consumers educated within the field of social science. By interviewing consumers from these two fields of education, the reasons for the behavior appeared. The respondents who showed a large degree of consumer ethnocentrism buy domestic produced goods for the following reasons: Higher perceived quality, prestige, production methods, the environment, to support the national economy and parental influence. Respondents educated within the field of social science favors imports because of: higher perceived quality, Country-of-origin, parental influence and they see them self as global consumers. Both groups of respondents believe that they were not affected in their mindset during their education.