Millennials between consumer ethnocentrism and attitudes towards local campaigns

Abstract

Abstract This paper aims to measure the Romanian Millennials’ ethnocentrism tendency, together with their attitude of consumption towards Romanian-made products. Millennials, known as the Generation Y, are the demographic cohort, following the Baby Boomers and the Generation X. There is no specific date in time when this cohort begins and ends, but researchers put the early 1980’s as starting birth and, the mid-1990’s to early 2000’s as the ending birth year. Representing the youth and the young adult population, they are the principal source of worldwide influence in the world. Given the fast and massive changes of the society, in which the Generation Y developed, there are numerous socio-psychological characteristics promoted by researchers, all of these being essential for buying and consumer status of Millennials. The data were gathered using a structured online questionnaire, filled in by 518 Romanian youngsters, representative for the Generation Y, aged between 15 to 34 years old. Ethnocentrism was measured using the consumer ethnocentric tendencies scale (CETSCALE) developed by Shrimp and Sharma (1987). The attitudinal statements were used to measure the consumption behavior towards locally made products. The data was analyzed with the SPSS 20.0 statistics software for Windows, using descriptive statistics, factor analysis and correlation. The research results underline the role of the government and industry in encouraging Romanians to buy local products.