Consumer ethnocentrism and reference group: Case of Thailand

Abstract

Consumer ethnocentrism is an important marketing concept that is widely used to understand the potential in the international market. This study investigates the relationships among influencing factors from reference group and consumer ethnocentrism in the context of Thailand. It reveals strong positive relationships among various types of influencing factors on purchasing imported products. However, it also reveals negative relationships among consumer ethnocentrism and some influencing factors from both distant and proximal referents. This study concludes that peer influence and other distant referent influence operate most strongly in situations with weak familial communication, and socio-oriented familial communication patterns. In addition, people who appeared in mass media seem to play a relatively small role as information sources, perhaps because Thai consumers have learned to be skeptical of advertising of learning about ethnocentrism from various types of media