مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

How product origin influences consumer beliefs about product quality, purchase intentions and behavior has stimulated extensive work in international marketing and is well documented (e.g. Balabanis & Diamantopoulos, 2004; Diamantopoulos, Schlegelmilch, & Palihawadana, 2011; Peterson & Jolibert, 1995; Verlegh & Steenkamp, 1999). The literature focuses on explaining why consumers refrain from buying foreign products and has provided evidence that purchasing behavior is negatively influenced by consumer ethnocentrism, namely the “beliefs held by consumers about the appropriateness and indeed morality of purchasing foreign-made products” (e.g., Shimp & Sharma, 1987, p. 280). Previous research documents that consumer affinity (Oberecker, Riefler, & Diamantopoulos, 2008), and country animosity (Klein, Ettenson, & Morris, 1998) also are important determinants of foreign product preferences. Furthermore, a large number of studies shows that consumers use global brands in order to strengthen their identification with the global world (Bartsch, Diamantopoulos, Paparoidamis, & Chumpitaz, 2016). Consumer cosmopolitanism explains attitudes and behavior towards global brands (Riefler & Diamantopoulos, 2009) and acculturation to global consumer culture influences consumer behavior (Cleveland & Laroche, 2007).

Similarly, with increasing globalization, businesses have concentrated their efforts on the development of international brands, restructured brand portfolios, and eliminated many local brands (Schuiling & Kapferer, 2004). Still, in some industries, such as food, domestic brands dominate international brands. For example, Euromonitor (2011) data shows that the global packaged food market is exceptionally fragmented, with the top 10 branded players accounting for b16% of global retail value in 2010 and only two global players holding a global share of N3% (Nestlé and Kraft). Thus, while we observe increasing globalization in many product categories, such as home appliances or beauty-care, it seems that other sectors are more immune to globalization effects. Some studies attempt to explain the preferences for domestic products and found that domestic bias may be an important determinant of domestic product purchase behavior (Josiassen, 2011). Also, levels of national identification are related to domestic purchases (Verlegh, 2007). Along similar lines, several studies observe that the consumer ethnocentrism is positively related to domestic product purchases (e.g., Balabanis, Diamantopoulos, Mueller, & Melewar, 2001; Sharma, Shimp, & Shin, 1995). However, while this research already points in an interesting direction, a number of researchers have failed to replicate these results and found no or just a partial relationship between ethnocentrism and purchases of domestic products (e.g., Acharya & Elliott, 2003; Bi et al., 2012; Shoham & Brenčič, ۲۰۰۳).

Since findings explaining why consumers opt for domestic products remain mixed, we propose to consider an additional and previously unexplored construct in the international marketing literature, namely psychological ownership for domestic goods. More specifically, we analyze how preferences and consumers’ motives in choosing domestic goods are determined by shared psychological ownership. Previous research provides evidence that in general, consumers’ value in-group goods more compared to out-group goods (e.g. Gineikiene, Schlegelmilch, & Ruzeviciute, 2016), because the former are associated with high possession-self links (e.g. Dommer & Swaminathan, 2013).