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This paper investigates how language homophily between service providers and migrant consumers affects migrant consumers’ intentions to engage with financial and medical service providers.

Three empirical studies were conducted with migrant consumers living in Chile, England and the USA. Participants were presented information on service providers, and language homophily was manipulated between subjects. In the high (low) language homophily condition, service providers were described as having (not having) the ability to speak the native language of the migrant consumer.

Language homophily was found to increase migrant consumers’ expectation of control over a service encounter and, in turn, increase their intention to use a provider’s services. Collectivism was identified as a boundary condition. Among high collectivist consumers, language homophily did not affect service usage intentions; however, language homophily did positively affect service usage intentions among low collectivist consumers.

This work extends prior research on service provider language by finding a positive effect of language homophily on service usage intentions and by identifying mediating (i.e. expected control over the outcome of the service encounter) and moderating (i.e. collectivism) mechanisms for this effect.

The purpose of this paper is to study the attitudes of Asian and Western migrants and native‐borns in Australia toward foreign‐made products and the impact of consumer ethnocentrism on attitude formation.

The research was designed as a personal interview survey using shopping mall intercepts. A total of 206 consumers were asked to indicate their preferences for foreign‐made versus Australian‐made products for five diverse products. Respondents also responded to a short version of the CETSCALE, a scale measuring consumer ethnocentrism. Respondents were classified as Australian‐born, Asian‐born migrants, or Western‐born migrants.

Consumer ethnocentrism is negatively related to attitudes toward foreign‐made products for both overseas‐born (Asian and Western) migrants and local‐born Australians. Asian‐born migrants reported a significantly lower level of consumer ethnocentrism than both of the other respondent groups. Within the Western migrant group, males had a significantly higher level of ethnocentrism than females; there was no significant difference between genders in the other two respondent groups. For migrants, the number of years living in Australia is positively related to ethnocentrism. Age is related to ethnocentrism for all sample groups.

The study contributes to knowledge about ethnic marketing to migrant groups and consumer ethnocentrism, especially for Australia, in which migrants represent a large share of its population. Thus, it could very well serve as a model of “things to come” in other countries that experience large immigration inflows. This is the first study to look at ethnocentrism and attitudes toward country‐of‐origin of products of migrants and locally‐born people.

The purpose of the present study is to examine how local consumers disassociate themselves from migrants' acculturative practices and negotiate their identity through the symbolic consumption of fashion.

Data for this interpretive study were obtained via phenomenological interviews with locally-born Chinese youth in Guangzhou, China, to examine their acculturative consumption practices as well as their subjective experiences of perceived threats to their lifestyle imposed by the influx of outsiders. Snowballing and purposive sampling methods were adopted in recruiting the research participants.

Data analyses revealed that local consumers adopt three dissociative strategies (stigmatization, avoidance and self-assertion) in order to ascribe meanings to their fashion consumption practices as a means of resolving identity conflicts and differentiate themselves from the migrant consumers.

This research offers a single perspective (i.e. that of local-born young consumers residing in Guangzhou) on the locals' attitudes aimed at distinguishing and negotiating their identities in an intercultural setting via specific fashion-clothing choices. This research has theoretical implications for the consumer acculturation theory and identity negotiation.

Findings yielded by the present study have important implications for commercial companies focusing on fashion consumption, in particular for marketing practices aimed at rural-urban identification and youth market segmentation.

This study contributes to the existing discussion on consumer acculturation by offering an intracultural perspective to the understanding of local consumers' responses to migrants' acculturation. It also provides managerial insights for fashion retailers, prompting them to rethink their market segmentation strategies to address population mobility in the marketplace and better understand how it alters the in-between social relationships that result in different consumption patterns and practices.

This study contributes to the existing discussion on youth consumer acculturation theories by offering an intercultural perspective to the understanding of local consumers' responses to migrants' acculturation attempts. It also offers managerial insights for fashion retailers, prompting them to rethink their market segmentation strategies to address population mobility and better understand how it alters the social relationships that result in different consumption patterns and practices.

What drives product adoption among bottom of the pyramid (BoP) consumers? The purpose of this paper is to identify several factors affecting Chinese migrant workers’ adoption of online banking. Chinese migrant workers are BoP consumers that have migrated from rural China to work in China’s expanding urban regions such as Shanghai.

In collaboration with the Shanghai Survey Corps of the National Bureau of Statistics, the present research conducts structured interviews with more than 1,200 Chinese migrant workers.

The results of a logit regression analysis suggest that Chinese migrant workers are more likely to adopt online banking when they have higher levels of economic, biological, and social resources.

The results support habit adoption theory and provide managers with insight on how to increase BoP consumers’ adoption of financial services.

Greater adoption of financial services among BoP consumers, including Chinese migrant workers, can improve the well-being of these historically marginalized consumers.

The present research provides initial evidence that habit adoption theory and resource availability helps to explain Chinese migrant workers’ adoption of online banking.

The purpose of this special issue is to extend the growing research on the challenges and opportunities facing services marketers in an increasingly culturally diverse global marketplace.

The nine papers included in this special issue use a variety of research methods (e.g. case study, experiments and surveys), participants (e.g. customers, employees and online panel members) and service settings (e.g. fast food, post office, weight loss, bank, home loan, personal fitness and offshore outsourcing).

All the nine papers highlight the importance of studying the unique perspectives of the customers and employees involved in intercultural interactions in diverse service settings in marketplaces and societies that are either already or have recently become multicultural.

The findings from the nine papers have useful implications for future research on services marketing in multicultural markets, although these may not always be generalisable beyond the unique context of the studies reported in each of these papers.

All the nine papers also present some useful directions for services marketing managers in the multicultural markets, to help them understand and manage the expectations of their culturally diverse customers, as well as employees.

This special issue is unique because it is one of the first attempts to understand the unique challenges and opportunities for services marketers in the growing multicultural global marketplace, from a theoretical, as well as empirical, point of view.

The consumer acculturation literature argues that reconstituting familiar embodied practices from the culture of origin leads to a comforting sense of home for consumers who move from one cultural context to another. This paper aims to extend this thesis by examining further dimensions in migrant consumers’ experiences of home culture consumption.

This paper analyses data gathered through multi-modal depth interviews with Southeast Asian skilled migrants in New Zealand through the conceptual lens of embodiment.

Building on Dion et al.’s (2011) framework of ethnic embodiment, the analysis uncovers home culture consumption as multi-layered experiences of anchoring, de-stabilisation and estrangement, characterised by convergence and divergence between the embodied dimensions of being-in-the-world, being-in-the-world with others and remembering being-in-the-world.

This paper underscores home culture consumption in migration as an ambivalent embodied experience. Further research should investigate how other types of acculturating consumers experience and negotiate the changing meanings of home.

Marketers in migrant-receiving and migrant-sending cultural contexts should be sensitised to disjunctures in migrants’ embodied experience of consuming home and their role in heightening or mitigating these disjunctures.

This paper helps contribute to consumer acculturation theory in two ways. First, the authors show how migrants experience not only comfort and connection but also displacement, in practices of home culture consumption. Second, the authors show how migrant communities do not only encourage cultural maintenance and gatekeeping but also contribute to cultural identity de-stabilisation.

This study investigated consumers' satisfaction with local rice attributes and willingness to pay (WTP) for improvement by internal migrants and natives in urban Ghana.

Primary data was sourced from 304 urban consumers and ordered probit regression was employed.

Urban consumers had higher satisfaction with imported rice attributes than local rice. Consumers were unsatisfied with aroma, availability/accessibility, cleanliness, packaging, grain appearance, measurement standard, and taste of local rice. Moreover, 90% were willing to pay higher prices for local rice with improved attributes and WTP was higher among natives than migrants. Averagely, urban consumers are willing to pay 51% increase in market price of local rice if attributes were improved. Natives, males, educated, high-income, local rice consumption, shopping from supermarkets, trust in certification bodies, and dissatisfaction with local rice attributes boost WTP for improved local rice attributes.

There is a great market potential for local rice with improved attributes. Thus, there should be an improvement in local rice attributes and sold at moderate price and in supermarkets.

We compared consumers' satisfaction and WTP for improved local rice attributes among internal migrants and natives in urban Ghana.

This paper aims to explore how marketplace-enabled performances help reconstitute masculinity in the context of transnational mobility.

Grounded in consumer acculturation theory, this paper draws on theories of gender performance to inform a hermeneutic analysis of depth interviews with skilled migrant men.

To navigate experiences of emasculation, participants performed three remasculation strategies: status-based hypermasculinity, localised masculinity and flexible masculinity.

This study offers insights for the design of migrant settlement policy. Further research should investigate the remasculation strategies of low resource migrant men.

This paper makes two contributions to theories of gendered acculturation. First, while studies of acculturation as a gendered performance have shown how marketplace resources support the gendered identity projects of female migrants and the children of migrants, this paper provides the missing perspective of skilled migrant men. Beyond acting as “resistant” cultural gatekeepers of their family members’ gendered acculturation practices, first-generation migrant men emerge as creative, agentic and skilled negotiators of countervailing gender regimes. Second, transnationally dispersed families, migrant communities and country of origin networks emerge not only as acculturating agents which transmit gender regimes but also as audiences which enable the staging of remasculating performances.

Purpose: This chapter seeks to understand ethnic identification among second-generation consumers by drawing upon the lived experiences of British Indian migrants in England.

Methodology/Approach: The authors analyze interviews with middle-class, Hindu, second-generation British Indian women through Bourdieu’s key concepts of capital, field, habitus, and distinction.

Findings: Through resources such as Bollywood cinema, and Indian schools for language, music, and dance, second-generation consumers acquire, use and (re) produce situationally prized subcultural capital for distinction from other ethnic consumers and members of the white majority group. Ethnicity is central to second-generation consumers’ identity projects, and their everyday social interactions. Ethnicity is considered in uplifting and empowering terms, and first-generation consumers play a key role in reinforcing this belief.

Research Limitations/Implications: Due to our small sample size, limited by class, religion, and gender, the findings of this chapter might not be generalizable to the wider population. Instead, they can be used to develop new theoretical ways of understanding ethnicity in multicultural settings with long-established migrant populations.

Social Implications: Ethnicity can play a central and positive role in the everyday lives of second-generation consumers. By investigating this further, we can improve our understanding of contemporary, multicultural societies.

Originality/Value of Paper: Prior work in consumer research has focused on understanding first-generation migrant consumers through the lens of acculturation, and foregrounding experiences of stigma and tension. Instead, the authors foreground the positive and uplifting lived experiences of second-generation consumers in relation to their ethnicity. This chapter extends the literature on second-generation ethnic consumer identity work.

The purpose of this paper is to examine spending pattern of Chinese migrant workers from rural regions to urban cities from a social identity perspective, which stems from Chinese Hukou system (household registry system). This study proposes a theoretical model for consumer utility function (a combination of economic utility and social utility) which takes into account the choice of social identification.

This study focusses on the influence of rural and urban identification on consumption patterns of Chinese migrant workers. These assumptions were verified based on a survey with 650 samples in Shanghai, one of the most developed cities in China.

Results indicate that affirmative social identification has a significantly positive effect on the level of consumption for migrant workers. High level of rural identification has a more significant impact than urban identification on survival consumption including food, medicine and family support. On the other hand, high level of urban identification has a more significant impact than rural identification on development consumption including education for children, training and recreation. Besides, there are significant interaction effects between income and identity on consumption, which confirms the identity effect on classical economic model and is in line with identity economics’ arguments.

This study outlines the importance of social identity in both economics and marketing domains and proposes a theoretical model which advances understanding of a model on similar lines proposed by Akerlof and Kranton’s (2000) and Benjamin et al. (2010). Empirical tests with Chinese migrant workers’ data present that their consumption patterns are influenced by their level of social identifications.