Favoritism Toward Foreign and Domestic Brands: A Comparison of Different Theoretical Explanations

Five theoretical approaches can predict favoritism toward domestic and foreign brands. This article applies a contrastive perspective to examine social identity, personal identity, cultural identity, system justification, and categorical cognition theories and their attendant constructs. The authors propose a set of main-effects hypotheses as well as hypotheses related to both product and country moderation effects on attitudes toward and loyalty to domestic and foreign brands. They test the hypotheses on a sample of Chinese consumers with respect to salient brands from 12 product categories. The results indicate that three of the theoretical approaches examined can explain only one side of favoritism-most commonly favoritism toward domestic brands-but not favoritism toward both domestic and foreign brands. Consumer xenocentrism, a concept rooted in system justification theory, seems to provide more consistent predictions for both domestic- and foreign-brand bias.