The Relationship between Ethnocentric Tendencies of Turkish Consumers and Socio Psychological Factors
IntroductionDespite the increasing homogeneity in the global markets, ethnicity and nationalism are stil powerful motivational tools for modern markets. Ethnicity emerges as a balancing force for individuals' sense of identity and for the behavior of individuals who have lost their sense of identity due to globalization. International marketers have realized certain differences among nations and most of the intercultural research studies have focused on the national characteristics of different markets (Vida et al. 2008) Along with globalization, consumers of all countries are surrounded by numerous products. Besides domestic ones, some of those products also originate from foreign countries. Multiple purchasing options cause more contradictions for people in terms of purchasing decisions by complicating consumers' purchasing psychology. Consumers have begun to think whether thier countries would worse off in case they prefer to buy foreign products. This situation makes consumer ethnocentrism an important object for international research studies on consumer behavior (Liang and Kong, 2010) In recent years, along with the impact of globalization, domestic and multinational companies have been in a rapidly increasing competition within domestic and international markets. Consumers in all countries are confronted with in a number of purchasing options due to the prevalence of foreign brands. In that case, the marketers have shown serious interest in developing scales that would determine consumers' preferences for domestic and foreign products (Netemeyer et al. 1991) In this context, studies on ethnocentrism and consumer ethnocentrism in the literature are concerned with developing the scale and testing the scales in different countries. This study aims to determine the relation between the ethnocentric tendencies of Turkish consumers and the socio psychological factors as antecedents of of ethnocentrism in the literature.Ethnocentrism and Consumer EthnocentrismThe concept of ethnocentrism was first coined as a sociological concept by the American academics Willam Graham Sumner in the meaning of "regionalism, cultural narrow mindedness" in his work named Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals written in 1906 (Cutura, 2006; An and Madran, 2011; Tayfun and Gurlek, 2014; Gulmez and Yilmaz, 2009; Klopf, 2001; Yarangumelioglu and icler, 2014) The concept comes down from the combination of two ancient Greek terms, namely, ethnos meaning 'race or nation' and kentron meaning 'centered' (Usunier Lee, 2005).Ethnocentrism, since Sumner's work, attracted many authors' attention and various definitions of the concept have been brought forth (Lewis, 1976; Hofstede, 1984; Shimp and Sharma, 1987; Lantz and Loeb, 1996; De Ruyter, Van Birgelen, Wetzels, 1998; Brown, 2000; Yu and Albaum, 2002; Kwak, Jaju, Larsen, 2006; Gulmez and Canan, 2009; Sokmen and Tarakcioglu, 2010).Ethnocentrism expresses the tendency to think of a certain culture's characterisitics being superior to others and to judge other cultures accordingly which becomes distinctive as a result of need for a social identity and is recognized whenever a distinct group emerges. The main reason for the formation of ethnocentrism is that people have difficulty in evaluating their own cultures objectively (Uyar and Dursun, 2015; Yarangumelioglu and icler, 2014; Eroglu and Sari, 2011; Asil and Kaya, 2013; Jain and Jain, 2010).According to Han (1988) and Maheswaran (1994) consumers have a negative attitude towards foreignorigin products when they are in a positive attitude towards the products of the countries they belong to. The main reason for this behavior pattern is the feeling of patriotism or nationalism. Ethnocentrism tends to increase when there is any threat to the inner group (Lantz and Loeb, 1996) The same phenomenon also arises in the presence of a threat to the economic and sociological well being of the country (Ha, 1998)