A Study on Global Consumption Orientation in an Emerging Market

Recent two decades have witnessed a growing number of studies on consumer attitudes and behavior concerning global brands. Various attitudinal and behavioral variables have been employed to better explain the behavior of consumers across countries in terms of why, when, and how they prefer and purchase global brands over non-global or local brands. Recent global brand research has focused on the underlying mechanisms through which to explain variations is consumers attitude toward global brands. Despite these efforts, our understanding of global brand attitude in the context of emerging markets has been very limited. This study is an attempt to expand the existing knowledge base of emerging market consumer behavior in the context of global brand consumption. Based on an extensive review of the literature, we propose that consumer characteristics and brand dimensions may be both important for a deeper understanding of consumer attitudes toward global brands. We propose that consumers' global consumption orientation as well as global brand dimensions such as perceived brand iconicity and perceived social responsibility, can be important explanatory variables accounting for the variance in brand attitude of emerging market consumers. To empirically test a set of hypotheses concerning the focal relationships, we conducted a survey of Chinese consumers using global brands in the smartphone industry. The findings indicate that consumers with global consumption orientation tend to show a more favorable response to global brands. We also find the brand attitude of globally oriented consumers may vary significantly depending upon the consumers' perceived characteristics of global brands. Specifically, the effect of global consumption orientation is found to be greater for brands with a high level of perceived brand iconicity, but this was not the case for brands with a high level of perceived social responsibility. Thus, the empirical results suggest that global consumption orientation and perceived brand characteristics can both contribute to the attitudinal liking of global brands in the context of emerging market consumers.