Product Ethnicity: Revisiting the Match between Products and Countries

TLDR

Consumers associate products with countries based on perceived know‑how and reputation. The study empirically investigates product ethnicity, the global sharing of such product‑country associations. Product ethnicity is operationalized as a two‑way measurement of country‑product associations, and the authors examine it across five countries (Study 1) and then test hypotheses linking it to country‑of‑origin theory in a cross‑cultural sample of China, Mexico, Germany, and the United States (Study 2). The authors find that respondents exhibit context‑centered association tendencies, linking goods more closely to their own country, and that consumers are more willing to purchase product offerings congruent with product ethnicity.

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.