Product Ethnicity: Revisiting the Match between Products and Countries

Abstract

Consumers make stereotypical associations between products and countries based on their perceptions of a country's know-how and reputation relative to the design, manufacturing, or branding of particular generic goods. When such associations are shared globally, they reflect product ethnicity, a concept that the authors empirically explore in this article. Operationalization of product ethnicity is based on country–product associations that consumers make with either a product or a country as the initial stimulus, resulting in a combined two-way measurement. The authors first investigate product ethnicity at an exploratory level across five survey countries for a large set of products and countries (Study 1). They identify what they term “context-centered association tendencies” because respondents tend to associate goods more closely with their own country. The authors then relate product ethnicity and context-centered association tendencies to the country-of-origin literature and test research hypotheses with a new set of countries (Study 2), comprising two collectivist cultures (China and Mexico) and two individualist cultures (Germany and the United States). Finally, Study 3 shows that consumers are more willing to buy product offerings that are congruent rather than noncongruent with product ethnicity.