The Antecedents and Consequences of Local Product-Ethnicity Perception—A Study of an Asian Advanced Emerging Market

Abstract

Although local product ethnicity (local PE) can serve as a key factor in explaining home country biases in local product superiority, this construct has been ignored since it was introduced. To address this limitation, this article proposes a four-phase research model (identifying consumer characteristics, constructing product category schema, categorizing local PE, and evaluating local vs. foreign products) to examine the antecedents and consequences of local PE in an Asian advanced emerging market, which is argued to be a more appropriate context (e.g., more evenly distributed local PE and nonlocal PE categories and coexistence of local and Western product superiority) than developed countries or less-developed emerging markets for this study. Regarding antecedents, the authors identify factors related to consumers’ experiences, information searching, and cognitive bases that can affect their construction of structured knowledge (schemas) about local products within particular categories. Specifically, local embeddedness of product categories is introduced to capture consumer knowledge about strong connotations stereotypically linking the local country to particular categories. As for consequences, the authors compare consumer evaluations of local versus developed-country products/services between local PE and nonlocal PE categories. Four surveys were conducted to empirically examine the model of local PE. The results support the hypotheses.