Consumer Racism in the Context of Foreign Product Purchase: A Conceptual Framework

With the growth of international trade and business, various ranges of products from different national origins are now available in many countries throughout the world. This has resulted in greater interest in examining consumer attitudes towards products of different national origins. There are so many factors that can influence the attitude of local consumer towards the purchase of foreign made products. For example, the source of negative attitude can be witness in the model developed by Klein, Ettenson and Morris. In their model, two sources of negative attitudes towards foreign made products were included, i.e., consumer animosity and consumer ethnocentrism. The current study attempts to conceptualize the construct of consumer racism into the consumer purchase behavior towards the foreign made products. This study proposes a framework related to the negative attitude on foreign products purchase by integrating the construct of consumer racism based on previous literatures and the underlying theory. Independent variable will be consumer racism, product judgments will be employed as mediating variable, and willingness to buy as the dependent variable. In this study, 5 hypotheses will be proposed based on the conceptual framework outlined.