Favoritism Toward Foreign and Domestic Brands: A Comparison of Different Theoretical Explanations

Abstract

Five theoretical approaches can predict favoritism toward domestic and foreign brands. This article applies a contrastive perspective to examine social identity, personal identity, cultural identity, system justification, and categorical cognition theories and their attendant constructs. The authors propose a set of main-effects hypotheses as well as hypotheses related to both product and country moderation effects on attitudes toward and loyalty to domestic and foreign brands. They test the hypotheses on a sample of Chinese consumers with respect to salient brands from 12 product categories. The results indicate that three of the theoretical approaches examined can explain only one side of favoritism—most commonly favoritism toward domestic brands—but not favoritism toward both domestic and foreign brands. Consumer xenocentrism, a concept rooted in system justification theory, seems to provide more consistent predictions for both domestic- and foreign-brand bias.