Australasian Marketing Journal

This article examines how consumer ethnocentrism (CE) relates to Chinese consumers’ evaluations of three store signs – Chinese name, English and Chinese name, and both languages along with the country of origin (COO) – for a hypothetical foreign bread shop. From an applied perspective, consumer attitudes and intention to purchase significantly favour the latter strategy. From an academic perspective, CE showed a significant relationship with bi-lingual signs. Compared to low ethnocentric consumers, high ethnocentric consumers had significantly less favourable attitudes and buying intentions towards bi-lingual signs. Ethnocentrism however, showed no relationship with attitudes and intentions towards a sign solely in Chinese. The study also found that COO can moderate the impact of CE on foreign brand evaluations, significantly so for a US brand but insignificant when the COO was Australia. The article closes with academic and applied implications for foreign brand naming strategies in China, as well as future research areas

There has been a great deal written about the diffusion of discontinuous technical innovations, but very little about diffusion of discontinuous innovations in other areas, such as packaging. Also, little research explores differences in diffusion rates of low-technological discontinuous innovations in different countries or cultures. This project studies the differences in the diffusion process for the screw cap on wine bottles in three countries. We use an internet survey of over 3,600 wine consumers to understand why this discontinuous innovation appears to be slower to diffuse in one country (the US), than in the other two (Australia and New Zealand). Logistic regression is used to model the characteristics of adopters versus non-adopters in each country. Our results show that educating the consumer about the advantages of discontinuous innovations can help to speed diffusion. Education can occur through advertising programs directed at the media and consumers, and also through word-of-mouth campaigns directed at consumers.

Current challenges to supermarket retailers posed by the growing popularity of online retail, customer desensitisation to advertising, and globalisation of large grocery retail firms, has led to an increased reliance on sales promotion as a means of attracting and retaining customers. Retailers recognise the need to make the shopping experience more rewarding for the consumer (Keh and Teo 2001), and have a keen understanding of which supplementary activities are likely to achieve this in their market. The difficulty faced by manufacturers, therefore, is in assessing which sales promotion activities that support their own goals will be favoured by retailers in culturally diverse environments. In light of China's attractiveness as an export destination for food products (Lo et al 2001), those wishing to do business effectively in China must understand specifically how sales promotion and culture are linked (Lee 2002). This exploratory study considers the use of, and preferences towards, different sales promotion methods in supermarkets in China and New Zealand, highlighting the potential impact of cultural influence on the application of particular tools.