The objective of this study is to explore the relationship between global consumption orientation and attitude toward global brands in international markets. Previous literatures have examined the effect of various consumer characteristics on global brand attitude and explained why consumers across countries prefer global brands over local brands. Despite of these efforts, most of the empirical studies in this area were focused on the context of developed markets, not emerging markets.
This study attempts to expand our existing knowledge by comparing two dissimilar contexts of international markets; developed and emerging. We propose that consumer characteristics such as global consumption orientation, consumer cosmopolitanism, and consumer ethnocentrism may be critical factors to explain the variance of global brand attitudes of both developed and emerging market consumers.
To test the proposed hypotheses, we surveyed 126 consumers from Korea (developed market) and Indonesia (emerging market) who have experienced global brands in skin/body care and sports shoes industry. The findings show that Koreans are more globally oriented and have more preferences on global brands over local brands, whereas the Indonesians have relatively lower positive global brand attitudes since they are more ethnocentric. We also found that there is a positive relationship between global consumption orientation and global brand attitude and that relationship is expected to be greater with a high level of consumer cosmopolitanism, especially for Koreans. In contrast, the high level of consumer ethnocentrism has no mitigating effect, rather directly decreases the positive global brand attitude.