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While globalization has made it easier to consume foreign products, consumption decisions are rarely straightforward. Both love and hate relationships between consumers and countries exist and can even coexist. This paper aims to gain a better understanding of how positive/negative and general/specific consumer attitudes impact foreign product judgment and ownership. An integrative model explores the predictive power of affinity, animosity, cosmopolitanism and ethnocentrism simultaneously. Specifically, the authors investigate a paradoxical “tug of war” which takes place inside consumer minds – the coexistence of affinity and animosity toward the same country.

Using a quantitative approach, the authors analyze data from 202 consumers and test it in intra-national and international contexts.

The results demonstrate the importance of an integrative model that takes into account opposing impacts on consumer behavior. Additionally, the data reveal that affinity and animosity are not bi-polar endpoints on a continuum. Finally, affinity outweighs animosity with respect to impacting product judgment and ownership.

The study was conducted in Israel. Hence, replications in other multi-cultural countries are needed.

Marketers can use a segmentation matrix to target audiences based on the existing “attitudinal mix” in their focal markets. Marketers can use the affinity drivers identified here to overcome animosity.

The “tug of war” model advances the animosity model, as it implies that to use attitudinal data theoretically and practically, there is a need to account for a full spectrum of general and country-specific attitudes. Affinity was tested for the first time within national borders.

This study aims to clarify the relationship between two plausible conflicting attitudes in cross-cultural context-consumer affinity and consumer ethnocentrism (CET) and to explore their interactive effect on product trust and willingness-to-buy.

A total of 392 usable responses were obtained. Previously validated scales of consumer affinity, CET, product trust and willingness-to-buy were used and showed good reliability. Hierarchical multiple regression and the bootstrapping method were conducted to test the hypotheses.

This study revealed that consumer affinity is positively associated with product trust, which in turn promotes consumers’ intention to buy products from the affinity country; CET moderates the relationship between consumer affinity and product trust; and CET also moderates the mediating effect of product trust on the relationship between consumer affinity and willingness-to-buy.

First, this study helps to explain how consumer affinity boosts willingness-to-buy, and it reveals the type of consumers whose product trust is most notably influenced by their level of ethnocentrism. Second, this study examines the moderating effects of CET on the relationship between consumer affinity and product trust, which can help to identify the situations in which consumer affinity influences product trust most strongly. Third, this study examined the interactive effect of consumer affinity and CET on product trust and its subsequent effect on willingness-to-buy. The findings help to explain the CET’s critical role in the effect of consumer affinity by relating it to the literature of product trust and willingness-to-buy.

Given the crucial role that consumer affinity plays in improving consumers’ trust in and buying intention for a country’s products, governments, multinational enterprises and international marketers should strategically construct, maintain and magnify a positive national image to the world. This study’s results also clarify that consumer affinity does not conflict with CET; not only can they coexist but also they are positively related. The crucial implication is that CET is not always a barrier to purchasing foreign products.

Although research interest in consumer attitudinal conflict issues is increasing, the real relationship and interactive effects of plausible conflicting attitudes between consumer affinity and CET remain to be understood. This study bridges a gap between CET and willingness-to-buy by considering the boundary conditions of consumer attitudes toward a specific country (inherent in consumer affinity). Furthermore, this study is, to the best of the author’s knowledge, the first to link consumer affinity with willingness-to-buy through the mediating effect of product trust. These findings are helpful for understanding how consumer affinity positively effects willingness-to-buy.

This study aims to investigate the moderating effect of soft power on the relationships between affinity toward country, country image, cosmopolitanism and preference on the internationalization of Brazilian cultural products.

This survey used data collected from a non-probabilistic sample of 478 Portuguese respondents, which was further analyzed using the partial least squares technique.

Affinity related to Brazil, the image of Brazil and cosmopolitanism influenced preference, and this, in turn, influenced the internationalization of Brazilian cultural products. Soft power moderated the relationships between cosmopolitanism and preference, country image and preference and preference and internationalization of cultural products.

This study focuses on the internationalization of a cultural product from one particular emerging economy (Brazil) to a specific developed economy (Portugal). Thus, the findings are bound to this specific context. However, it contributes to the field of international marketing research by concentrating on the moderating effects of soft power in the relationship between the investigated constructs.

In the case of Brazilian cultural products, i.e. music, emphases on Brazilian unique resources, i.e. the beauty, excitement, fantasy, mystique, prestige, etc. of natural resources, may be important features to be taken into consideration in national cultural policies.

The study contributes to the international marketing and consumer behavior literature by showing that consumer preference, affinity toward country and cosmopolitanism are important antecedents of the internationalization of cultural products.

This study aims to investigate how the social identity theory and emotional attachment theory influence the willingness of consumers to buy foreign cosmetic products. Specifically, this study examines the relationship between consumer ethnocentrism, foreign product judgment and willingness to buy foreign products. Furthermore, the interaction effect of consumer affinity and patriotism are tested in the model.

An online survey of 208 millennial Muslim women consumers was used to collect the data. The structural equation modeling test was used to assess the six hypotheses. Moreover, the two-step estimation approach was used to test the interaction moderation of consumer affinity and patriotism.

The results indicate that consumer ethnocentrism has a positive and significant relationship with foreign product judgment. Foreign product judgment was also found to have a positive and significant relationship with willingness to buy. In addition, this study concludes that affinity was found to moderate the relationship between consumer ethnocentrism and foreign product judgment and strengthen the positive and significant effect of foreign product judgment on the willingness to buy. Finally, patriotism did not moderate the relationship between consumer ethnocentrism and foreign product judgment. However, patriotism moderated the relationship between foreign product judgment and willingness to buy.

This study only focused on one category (i.e. low involvement product), and the authors recommend future studies to examine a high involvement product. Other individual orientation constructs, such as xenocentrism, need to be examined in future studies. Moreover, only intentional measures were investigated. Thus, further research could correlate intentional measures with product ownership. Finally, future research could examine how consumers behave differently across nations. Thus, the present model would require cross-cultural research.

Marketers focusing on global branding and international marketing can benefit from the findings of this paper by understanding the antecedents of consumers’ willingness to buy in the foreign cosmetic products setting. Additionally, foreign cosmetic marketers could focus on consumer affinity to strengthen the communication with and arouse the affinity of Muslim millennials women consumers in Indonesia. Finally, marketers can incorporate messages and signals of patriotism in their marketing communications to increase Muslim millennial women consumers’ love and pride.

The growing obsession with beauty among women has led to the immense growth of the cosmetics industry. This phenomenon has spawned an abundance of cosmetic products on the market. The advancement of information technology has further increased competition for cosmetic products as more products can be quickly brought to market. Muslim millennials consumers must be aware and careful about raw materials, impacts on long-term health, impacts on the national economy, environmental impacts and halal certification when using various kinds of cosmetics.

This study contributes to the literature on international marketing research by incorporating the interactive effect of consumer affinity and patriotism in the acceptance of foreign cosmetic products.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of country affinity, ethnocentrism and product quality judgment on self-brand connection regarding both domestic and foreign brands.

The study involved an online experiment and was conducted using online questionnaires. Sampling was done among undergraduate students of a Southwestern university in the US. The data was analyzed using SEM with PLS.

The results showed, for foreign brands, consumer self-brand connection increased through the effect of country affinity and product quality judgment. For domestic brands, self-brand connection was influenced by ethnocentrism (and not country affinity or product quality judgment).

This study only focused on one industry (i.e. Television industry), and the authors recommend future studies examine a broader range of industries. Moreover, other country related constructs such as national identity need to be examined in future studies.

Marketers focusing on global branding and international marketing can benefit from the findings of this paper by understanding the routes through which consumers build self-brand connections in foreign vs domestic settings. Additionally, marketers can, more effectively, invest their resources by focusing on the factors that can be influential (i.e. ethnocentrism for domestic brands vs country affinity and product judgment for foreign brands).

This study examines the effect of country affinity, ethnocentrism and product quality judgment for consumers' domestic country as well as a foreign country. Moreover, this study contributes toward the global branding literature by incorporating self-brand connection as a behavioral outcome.

The purposes of this study were to explore the moderating effect of consumer affinity on brand personality and consumers' intention to stay in a hotel, as well as on self-congruity and consumers' intention to stay in a hotel.

This study collected data from 386 inbound tourists to Taiwan. Hierarchical regression analysis was applied to analyze the data.

The results showed that brand personality, self-congruity and consumer affinity have significant positive effects on consumers' intention to stay in a hotel, respectively. Moreover, consumer affinity has significant moderating effect on brand personality and intention to stay in a hotel, as well as on self-congruity and intention to stay in a hotel.

Consumer affinity is a construct that identifies national attributes, and it strengthens the relationships between brand personality or self-congruity and consumers' intention to stay in a hotel from the level of country-specific affect. The results of this study can provide hotel marketers with reference for marketing management.

Although past studies have examined the relationship between consumer affinity and purchase intention or behavior, the effect of consumer affinity construct on hotel consumers' intention to stay remains sparse in the hotel context. This study confirmed that consumer affinity has significant moderating effect on brand personality and intention to stay in a hotel, as well as on self-congruity and intention to stay in a hotel.

Drawing on the philosophy of retail service quality, this study aims to empirically investigate how salespeople’s personal interaction affects customers’ positive word-of-mouth (WOM) intention through the lens of affective customer experience and consumers’ cross-cultural attitudes toward domestic or foreign products.

The hypothesis was tested with a two-step structural equation model using survey data obtained from 529 shopping center customers in China.

The positive impact of salespeople’s personal interaction on customers’ positive WOM intention is fully mediated by affective customer experience. In addition, consumer ethnocentrism strengthens the positive impact of salespeople’s personal interaction on affective customer experience, whereas this study fails to find the moderating effect of foreign product affinity.

To increase customers’ positive WOM intention, store managers need to encourage their frontline sales personnel to personally interact with customers to support customers’ problem-solving. Also, frontline salespeople should pay more attention to consumers’ cross-cultural attitudes such as consumer ethnocentrism when interacting with their customers.

By linking affective customer experience and consumers’ cross-cultural attitudes of ethnocentrism and affinity toward domestic or foreign products, this study further extends the knowledge of retail service quality on the relationship between salespeople’s personal interaction and customers’ positive WOM intention.

Consumer affinity may be a key factor in overcoming ethnocentric barriers and promoting a favourable attitude towards specific foreign countries and their products. However, progress in knowledge of this concept in international marketing literature has suffered from a lack of integration and analysis. The purpose of this study was to shed new light on the concept of consumer affinity based on a comprehensive systematic review of the literature, provide a critical analysis of previous research in terms of conceptual, methodological and substantive issues and problems and offer avenues for future research.

This structured systematic review of consumer affinity included articles published in international peer-reviewed journals from 2008 to 2021, examining key conceptual, operational and substantive aspects.

This systematic review of articles on consumer affinity published over the past 14 years revealed that this line of research is a growing vibrant domain in the context of international marketing. It also showed that current knowledge of consumer affinity is characterized by theoretical inconsistencies, contradictory empirical results and scant international marketing research in the affinity domain.

This article provides an overview of the extant literature on consumer affinity and yields a consolidated image of its current status, as well as a research agenda that raises new questions for the academic community.

Most consumers can buy products from various countries, including their own. Some prefer local products; others prefer the superior quality, price, or image of foreign products. This study aims to investigate the strength of these preferences and their effects on consumers' evaluations of, and intentions to buy, foreign products.

With a sample of 571 Thai consumers, this study measures consumer ethnocentrism (CET), a general attitude, and country‐specific attitudes toward three product categories (cars, radios, and pens) with American brand associations.

Thai consumers' evaluations of US products vary at different levels of consumer ethnocentrism and country‐specific attitudes.

Although it extends existing research into a less developed country setting, this study still relies on data from a single country.

Managers of both local and foreign brands can make use of these findings to position their offerings appropriately in Thailand.

This study extends the use of the CET concept to a less developed country and confirms prior results obtained in developed nations. In addition, it considers the joint effects of country‐specific and general attitudes in combination.

This paper examines nationalism as a driver of political risk and how it can lead to supply chain disruptions for foreign multinational enterprises (MNEs).

Conceptual research based on a review of the literature on nationalism and supply chain risk management.

This research unveils how economic nationalism could engender supply chain disruptions via discriminatory practices toward all foreign MNEs and how national animosity may generate additional risks for the MNEs of nations in conflict with one another. These discriminatory practices include an array of host government and grassroots actions targeting foreign MNEs. While economic nationalism and national animosity emanate from within a host country, they may stimulate geopolitical crises outside the host country and thereby affect the international supply chains of foreign MNEs.

This research lays the foundation for analytical and empirical researchers to integrate key elements of nationalism into their studies and recommends propositions and datasets to study these notions.

This study shows the implications that nationalist drivers of supply chain disruptions have for foreign MNEs and thus can help managers to proactively mitigate such disruptions.

This study reveals the importance of integrating notions of national identity and national history in supply chain research, since they play a key role in the emergence of policies and events responsible for supply chain disruptions.