EXPRESS: The Antecedents and Consequences of Local Product-Ethnicity Perception—A Study of an Asian Advanced Emerging Market
While local product ethnicity (local PE, i.e., consumers’ perception of their own country as the stereotypical origin of a particular category) 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 (consumer characteristics – construction of product category schema – categorization of local PE – evaluation of 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 non-local PE categories and coexistence of local and Western product superiority), as opposed to developed countries or less-developed emerging markets, for this study. For the antecedents, factors related to consumers’ experiences, information searching, and cognitive bases that can affect consumers’ construction of structured knowledge (schemas) about local products within particular categories are identified. 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 the consequences, consumer evaluations of local versus developed-country products/services between local-PE and non-local-PE categories are compared. Four surveys were conducted to empirically examine the model of local PE. The results support the hypotheses.