An Empirical Study on the Relationships Among Cosmopolitanism, Ethnocentrism, Perceived Country Similarity and Warmth: Focusing on Chinese Consumers

Abstract

Abstract Based on the previous research we can know that the Consumer Ethnocentrism (CET) and Cosmopolitanism (COS) can affect the consumers' purchase intention. On the other hand, in terms of similarity-attraction theory, the degree of similarity perceived by consumers which can impact the consumers' responses to the foreign countries. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of factors including CET, COS and perceived similarity with country-of-origin on consumers' responses to foreign countries. In terms of researchers about country image, the consumers' responses to foreign countries divide into two parts that are attitudes toward foreign countries' products and perceived warmth from the foreign countries. The empirical analysis was conducted by analyzing 431 copies of survey data collected from Chinese consumers who lived in Beijing and Zhengzhou. The result indicated that consumer ethnocentrism is negatively related to both perceived warmth from the foreign countries (America, Japan) and attitude towards foreign products (Italy, America, Japan, Korea), cosmopolitanism is positively related to both perceived warmth from the foreign countries and attitude towards foreign products, perceived similarity only has positive effect on the perceived warmth from the foreign countries (Germany, America, Canada, Japan, Korea) and has no effect on the attitude towards foreign products. Keywords: Consumer Ethnocentrism (CET), Cosmopolitanism (COS), similarity-attraction theory, country image, attitude towards foreign countries' products, perceived warmth.