Perceived Brand Globalness

What it is

The paper starts from a question about consumers: why do some prefer global brands to local ones? The authors treat perceived globalness as something that sits in the buyer's mind, a belief about how widely a brand is sold, and they study how that belief relates to other beliefs about the brand. It is a perception, so two buyers can differ on how global the same brand seems.

The article Taking a Brand Global: Psychology Across Cultures uses the finding when it discusses the choice between keeping a brand identical across markets and adjusting parts of it. The finding bears on one part of that choice, which is how much global identity to show.

In effect

Using consumer data from the United States and Korea, the authors report that perceived brand globalness was positively related to both perceived quality and prestige, and that these in turn were related to the likelihood of purchase. The effects were weaker among consumers higher in ethnocentrism, a measure of how strongly people favour buying from their own country.

Read at that level, the result says that in these two samples a global image was linked with added value, and that how much it added varied with how strongly buyers favoured the home market.

What it does not say

The concept does not say that global brands are better than local ones, and it does not rank countries or groups of consumers. The data come from two countries, so they describe a pattern in those places and say nothing about others.

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