Abstract
Current lifestyle change has led millennial customers to have awareness about their cloth in daily life to accentuate their personality. In the other side batik cloth industry is growing rapidly and contribute to the domestic economic. Despite the advancement of cloth printing technology, business competition in the batik industry need to balancing their production with the essence of batik as an Indonesia ethnic product’s therefore preserve its soul as a valuable heritage of Indonesia culture. Understanding how the customer perceive the value of batik cloth contributes to the effective marketing approach especially for the local medium enterprises. This research was aimed to study the influence of customer diversity seeking and attitude toward ethnic culture to the purchase intention and willingness to share positive electronic word of mouth of the batik cloth, mediating by social value, emotional value and epistemic value as the focus of the research while moderated by ethnic embeddedness. The conceptual model was modified from the previous studies by added e-WOM as a relevance variable in digital era. The research model was implied on non-Javanese millennial customer of batik cloth to segregate the ethnicity perception. Primary data obtained by convenience sampling through the online questionnaire. The eligible sample was collected from 360 respondents who met the criteria. Data were analyzed by Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) and processed by SmartPLS 3.0. The result revealed that both customer diversity seeking and attitude toward ethnic culture have significant effect on the consumption value. All of the three value which are social, emotional and epistemic shown significantly positive impact on e-WOM and customer purchase intention while ethnic embeddedness proven to have the moderation effect on epistemic value and social value. Interestingly social value was found as the strongest predictor of purchase intention. This research provides new insights in understanding consumer behavior towards batik cloth product as well as suggested practical implications that could help batik producers to implement an effective marketing strategy through the digital channel.
Highlights
People could catch a glimpse of batik everywhere in Indonesia
Millennial are distinct in term of their motivations (Kim et al 2009), decision making rationales and value drivers (Boyd, 2010) yet millennial remain poorly understood in regard of their behaviour toward the ethnic products consumption
This study found that the stronger predictor of purchase intention for batik cloth product is social value (0,514) following by epistemic value and emotional value
Summary
People could catch a glimpse of batik everywhere in Indonesia. As a nation icon of Indonesia’s national culture, people in Indonesia wear batik cloth in all occasion from formal occasion to semi-formal occasion or even as homemaker cloth. There are several factors drive customer behaviours toward the ethnic disparate products (Hyun & Fairhust, 2017) the two of them are attitude towards the ethnic culture and diversity seeking motive that relevance for batik cloths study These have moderated by ethnic embeddedness in batik as an important product cues that may influence the consumption of ethnic products (Grier et al, 2006). The Consumption Value Theory (CVT) introduced by Seth et al, (1991) is used, and refer mainly to the study by Hyun and Fairhust (2017) who have grounded and made some modification of the CVT for the purpose to study ethnically disparate product Albeit those the research finding only focused on purchase intention, while the purpose in marketing is to encourage customer for buying the product and make the customer willingly to share positive feedback about the product to their peers or positive electronic word of mouth (e-WOM) as suggested by Hennig-Thurau et al, (2004), there is a need to test whether consumption values induce the willingness to share positive e-WOM of batik cloth in this digital era. Millennial is a potential segment for the cloth industry while they have different perspectives with the older generation, to understand the goals that millennial consumers are trying to achieve and the guiding behaviour within a culture or for a specific person is important for researcher (Bennett, 1998)
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