Integrating Global Elements: A Research on Consumers’ Attitudes toward Global Consumer Culture Positioning for Chinese Brands

Abstract

In the Chinese market, with the profound influence of global consumer culture, more and more companies try to associate their brands with globally accepted languages, aesthetic styles, and story themes. In academics, in responding to this new trend, Alden, et al. （1999） propose a new branding strategy of global consumer culture positioning （GCCP）, which is defined as the strategy that associates brands with a given global culture. Following their classic research, scholars tend to reveal why consumers prefer GCCP and how to develop GCCP. Our comprehensive review of relevant extant literature regarding GCCP demonstrates two important gaps that warrant further investigations. First, although some studies try to relate a series of consumers’ dispositions with attitudes toward GCCP, they rarely engage in conceptual discussions about why such dispositions are predictive of positive responses toward such positioning strategy. The mechanism of why consumers’ dispositions can drive preference for GCCP still remain unknown. Second, although numerous Chinese companies try to develop GCCP for their brands in responding to the needs of domestic consumers, few studies have specially taken Chinese brands as research objects and investigated Chinese consumers’ attitudes toward them. Due to a negative country of origin and a lack of self-confidence in the past, associating Chinese brands with global associations had been regarded as bu lun bu lei. Based on these two gaps, drawing on global branding literature, the authors construct a mediation model in which consumer cosmopolitanism drives consumers’ attitudes toward GCCP through urging their pursuit for global myth. In addition, prevention focus and promotion focus, which derive from the regulatory focus theory, are tested as moderators. The empirical results reveal that consumer cosmopolitanism indeed positively influences consumers’ pursuit for global myth, through which drives their attitudes toward GCCP. Furthermore, prevention focus and promotion focus exert differential moderating effects in the process of mediation. While prevention focus negatively moderates the influence of pursuit for global myth on consumers’ attitudes toward GCCP, promotion focus’s positive moderating effect cannot reach significance. In summary, our study contributes to the extant literature in three ways. First, it demonstrates the feasibility of the new branding strategy of GCCP for Chinese brands, which provides evidence for the fact that GCCP can be applied independent of the country of origin. Second, drawing on the global branding literature, this study reveals the mechanism through which consumer cosmopolitanism drives consumers’ attitudes toward GCCP. Third, this study verifies the differential moderating effects of prevention focus and promotion focus.