Against Mergers? The Influence of Self-Construal and Self-Activation

Using the case about "Coke merging Huiyuan",the authors investigate how participants' interdependence and different types of self-activation interact and thus influence the participants' attitude toward the events that foreign brands merge local brands.The results show that emphasizing the mergers and acquisitions promotes more negative brand attitude toward local brands,but only for those that are highly interdependent and self-threaten or those that are lowly interdependent and self-affirmed.Self-affirmed customers with high interdependence and self-threaten customers with low independence do not have lower evaluation of Huiyuan because of the merger.