A Consumer Ethnocentrism Model of Foreign Retail Store Patronage: An Initial Empirical Test of Extrinsic Cues and Moderating Effect in Beijing

Consumers often face retail store patronage decisions involving tradeoffs between domestic-owned and foreign-owned retailers due to conservative or patriotic reasons (e.g., Good and Huddleston 1995; Zarkada-Fraser and Fraser 2002). The most widely used construct to explain this phenomenon is consumer ethnocentrism (CET). CET is defined as the beliefs held by consumers that it is inappropriate (and maybe even immoral) to purchase imported products (Shimp and Sharma 1987). The CET concept originated from the country-of-origin (COO) research stream, where past COO studies found that COO, as a country image cue, is an important extrinsic cue in which consumers draw inferences from this cue in forming their perceptions and evaluations of product quality and purchase intent, particularly when they lack information about and/or are unfamiliar with products of foreign origins (c.f., Papadopoulos and Heslop 1993). Nonetheless, previous COO research was generally inconclusive, in part due to the use of single-cue versus multiple-cue models (Bilkey and Nes 1982). For instance, brand name has a negative effect on the saliency of the COO cue in some studies (e.g., Chao 1989; Teas and Agarwal 2000), but not in others (e.g., Ahmed and d'Astous 1996; Han and Terpstra 1988). Moreover, we are not aware of any COO studies that simultaneously assessed the impact of COO cue and store brand cue on consumers' willingness to shop in foreign retail stores (WTS), i.e., store-specific. Hence, these two constructs were included in our conceptual model as antecedents of WTS.