Guilty by stereotypic association: Country animosity and brand prejudice and discrimination
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Guilty by stereotypic association: Country animosity and brand prejudice and discrimination Cristel Antonia Russell & Dale W. Russell
Published online: 20 November 2009 # The Author(s) 2009. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
Abstract This research tests the proposition that brands suffer prejudice and discrimination due to animosity toward a country with which they have a strong stereotypic association. In the first study, attitudinal data collected across a range of brands that vary in terms of the strength of the brand–country association indicate that brands with strong stereotypic association with a country suffer direct prejudice, in the form of more negative attitudes, related to animosity. When the brand–country association is less strong, the relationship between animosity and brand attitudes is moderated by the strength of the stereotypic association. In the second study, the level of brand–country association is manipulated experimentally to provide additional evidence of its moderating role on the relationship between country animosity and both prejudice toward (more negative brand attitudes) and discrimination against (less choice) a new brand. Keywords Animosity . Country-of-origin . Brand attitudes . Stereotype . Prejudice . Discrimination
C. A. Russell (*) Department of Marketing, University of Auckland, 12 Grafton Road, Auckland 1142, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] D. W. Russell University of California, Berkeley, 50 University Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA e-mail: [email protected] D. W. Russell Auckland University of Technology, Private Bag 92006, Auckland 1142, New Zealand
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Mark Lett (2010) 21:413–425
“The nation which indulges toward another in an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection… The government sometimes participates in the national propensity, and adopts through passion what reason would reject; at other times it makes the animosity of the nation subservient to projects of hostility instigated by pride, ambition, and other sinister and pernicious motives.” George Washington, US President (1776) Animosity, defined as anger due to “previous or ongoing political, military, economic, or diplomatic events” (Klein et al. 1998, p. 90), is a concern for many nations (PEW 2007). Besides the wide range of political externalities associated with animosity, research has demonstrated that it affects consumer preferences and choices (Klein 2002). Surprisingly, research to date has not addressed whether and how animosity toward a country negatively affects consumers’ responses to brands associated with that country. Because brands vary in the degree to which they are associated with a country, animosity might have different effects on brands that are strongly stereotypic of a country and on brands that are more weakly associated with it. This research draws from the literature on prejudice and discrimination to assess whether the link between animosity and consumers’ at
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