The effect of respondents' nationality and familiarity with a product category on the importance of product attributes in consumer choice: Globalization and the evaluation of domestic and foreign products

This study compared the perceptions of 376 Japanese and 191 Canadian consumers concerning the importance of different product attributes for categories of products at various stages of globalization. There was less multivariate statistical difference between the two countries for those products at a more advanced stage of globalization (consumer electronics and clothing vs. food). The joint effects of the degree of familiarity with the category of product and the country of the respondent on the importance of the product attributes were tested. The effect of familiarity was found to result in a significant statistical multivariate difference for the clothing category only. The observed statistical power of the effect of country of respondent confirmed that more statistical difference was apparent for the least globalized product. No multivariate significant statistical interaction was found between familiarity and country of respondent. Using a multi-attribute model, the evaluation of the three categories of product was computed for seven different countries of manufacture. Comparison of the total scores of each country for each product category for the Japanese and the Canadian samples confirmed that the most globalized product showed least difference in its evaluation between countries of manufacture. A well-known strong bias toward domestic products was, however, observed in both samples.