The purpose of this research was to contribute to the development of animosity theory by exploring sources of consumer animosity that can stimulate feelings of animosity toward a target country. Also investigate the relationships among consumer animosity, consumer ethnocentrism, cultural acceptability, product judgment, reluctance to buy foreign product and product ownership in a developing context - Viet Nam.
Exploratory and empirical research is carried out in a developing country in order to explore the sources of animosity and to test the factors structure and the hypotheses through exploratory, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation model.
We find that there are four sources composed of animosity in Viet Nam context's called war experience, economic impact, territory conflict and health issue. The research extends the domain of the animosity construct to a four-dimensional structure rather than the two-dimensional structure used in most previous studies. It is the first study to empirically test an extended animosity model and investigate the role of consumer animosity, cultural acceptability and consumer ethnocentrism on product judgment and reluctance to buy foreign products in developing context.
Furthermore, the results of this research support original previous research (Klein et al., 1998) in terms of the relationship between consumer animosity and ethnocentrism toward reluctance to buy foreign products. However, the interesting result is that there is a significant relationship between consumer animosity and product judgment, which was not supported in the original research. Also cultural acceptability plays a role in reducing consumer ethnocentrism and improving product judgment. In addition, consumer animosity has a positive impact on ethnocentrism which reinforces consumers' patriotism in order to stimulate reluctance to buy foreign product made in target country.
In summary, the present study provides theoretical and empirical insights into direct and indirect effects of consumer animosity on purchase intentions, which may be beneficial for both local and international managers who suffer from boycotts of foreign merchandise.