Fu Guoqun
Studies at the beginning of this century showed that the stereotype of "domestic product are inferior to imported ones" is prevalent in both consumers and industrial sectors, among young and older consumers. Recently, we adopted the implicit measurement method to measure the attitudes of consumers in the 1980s and 1990s towards "domestic" and "imported" products and found that the stereotype still exists among post-80s generation of consumers, but this negative attitude towards domestic products mainly exists among female consumers. Generally, there is no stereotype that domestic products are inferior to imported ones. Male consumers born in the 1990s even prefer domestic products in some product categories. We mainly explain the above results from two generations of upbringing and the fact that women have less knowledge of the products under investigation and therefore rely more on "external clues" to form quality impressions.
I. Early studies consistently found that Chinese consumers have the stereotype of "domestic product are inferior to imported ones"
More than half a century ago, academics noticed that consumers preferred products from developed countries. Even though the intrinsic properties of the products are identical, when the products are labeled in different countries, consumers almost uniformly give higher evaluation to the products of developed countries, which is called the country of origin or "country of manufacture" image effect.
In 2003, our team conducted a study on the extent to which a product’s country-of-origin influences consumer choice. The core research question is the relative influence of brand, price and country of origin on consumer product selection behavior. That is, how much influence the above three factors have on consumer product selection. We use the Walkman as a stimulus product, using China, Japan and Malaysia as the country of origin; There are Japanese brands, Chinese brands and virtual brands. The price is divided into three levels: below 500 yuan, 500-1000 yuan and above 1000 yuan. The subjects were college students and MBA students. We used joint analysis and cluster analysis to analyze the data and identify two consumer groups, one brand-driven and the other price-inferred. The former mainly make purchase choices based on brand influence, while the latter group mainly infer product quality based on price, the higher the price, the more likely the product is to be selected. In the above two consumer groups, the influence of country of origin on the selection behavior has a weight of about 25%, indicating that the influence of country of origin cannot be ignored. The utility score indicated that consumers' preference for products originated from Japan was significantly higher than that from China and Malaysia.
The above research results are basically consistent with those of other domestic scholars. For example, Wang Haizhong and Zhao Ping (2004) tested Chinese consumers' attitudes toward brands from China, the European Union, the United States and Japan, and found that consumers generally had negative comments on local brands. Even in the fields where the overall market share of local brands was high, consumers did not show their preference for domestic brands. Another study (Wang Haizhong, Wang Jingxue, He Yun 2007) found that the use of Westernized brand names made consumers have a more positive perception of quality under the brand. Zhuang Guijun，et al. found that when a local brand is regarded as a foreign brand, consumers have a higher opinion of the brand, which explains why Chinese enterprises prefer foreign names in brand naming (Zhuang Guijun，et al. 2006).
