Purchase behavior in favor of domestic products in the West Balkans

Despite the long tradition of research on country-of-origin and consumer ethnocentrism, many of the issues remain unresolved in the literature, most notably the relationship between cognitive, affective and normative mechanisms in consumer choice behavior, and generalizability of existing research findings to non-traditional emerging and/or small country markets. This study responds to the current gaps in knowledge in that it examines behavioral manifestations of consumers’ choice of domestic vs. foreign products in four transitioning post-war markets in the West Balkans. Data were collected via personal interviews with 1954 adult urban consumers. The model of domestic purchase behavior was tested using SEM analysis. The results for all four country samples indicate that consumer ethnocentrism has affected domestic purchase behavior both directly and indirectly through domestic product appraisal. Moreover, we found consumer worldliness, a controversial construct in previous studies, to be uniformly negatively related to ethnocentrism. On the other hand, the findings related to the role of national identification as an antecedent to consumer ethnocentrism and domestic product appraisal were inconsistent across the samples. The implications of these findings for the validity and generalizability of existing models of consumer behavior in a new cultural context are considered, and implications for marketers interested in exploiting opportunities in the region are discussed.