The Impact Of Consumer's Global-local Identity On The Preference Of Global Versus Local Brand

As increasingly interconnected global marketplace—spurred by dramatic growth in worldwide investment and trade,the emergency of global media and the Internet,and the expansion of world travel in recent decades—presents a fundamental challenge to companies around the world.Consumers around the world increasingly make choices between global brands(sold under the same name in multiple countries around the world)and local brands(sold under a given name in one country or local region)?Thus,both local and multinational companies need a clear understanding of the drivers behind consumers‘ local versus global brand choices.Prior work has suggested that two streams of research are key to the study of consumer choice between local and global brands.In a study of the psychology of globalization,Arnett(2002)proposed that every individual possesses a local-global identity,comprising local and global identities,which affects how the individual defines himself or herself in relation to the social environment.Previous studies have revealed that when consumers with an activated global(local)identity found global(local)products to be more attractive than local(global)products,and vice versa.At the same time,however,other studies stated that local-global identity produces a contrastive effect.This study focuses on answering the following questions: How and why will global and local identities affect consumers‘ brand preferences? How consumers‘ self-construal and bicultural identity integration(BII)moderate the effect of consumers‘ identity and global versus local brand preferences? We construct a theory model based on analysis literatures of global—local identity,global consumer orientation(GCO),global and local brand preference and self-verification theory and cultural frame shift theory(CFS),and test six hypotheses through five studies.Study 1 use a macro-level secondary data set to estimate the association between an indirect measure of global-local identity and import data.The result indicates that consumers from countries with higher levels of globalization prefer global brands to local brand.Study 2 directly measure consumers‘ global-local identity at the individual level and brand preference through questionnaires,and the result verify the main effect of this paper(Hypothesis 1).Study 3 manipulating consumers‘global-local identity and measuring GCO,the author finds that consumers‘global-local identity has the direct and indirect effect toward global versus local brand preferences.It is found that the global consumption orientation is a partial mediation through bootstrap analysis(hypothesis 2 and 3).In study 4 the author finds that the moderating role of self-construal(hypothesis 4 and hypothesis 5).Study 5 examines the moderating role of BII,identifies a boundary condition for the effect of global—local identity on brand preferences.There are 5 chapters in this dissertation.Chapter 1 is an introduction to the research questions,research background,research problems and research methods.Chapter 2 is the literature review focus global—local identity,global consumption orientation and consumer brand preference.Chapter 3 is a review of related theories,including self-verification theory,self-construal theory and cultural frame shift theory.In chapter 4,the author constructs a theoretical model and proposes 6hypotheses.Chapter 5 is an empirical test in order to verified 6 hypotheses using second-hand data analysis,questionnaire survey and situational experiment.Chapter6 is the overall discussion.This chapter pointed out the theoretical and practical contribution of this research,as well as the limitations and future research.