Stereotyping global brands: Is warmth more important than competence?

By Živa Kolbl, Maja Arslanagić-Kalajdžić, Adamantios Diamantopoulos. Journal of business research, 2019

125 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Drawing on international branding literature and stereotyping research, the current study seeks to answer the following research questions: (1) do consumers' perceptions of brand globalness/localness influence their stereotypical assessments of brands in terms of their warmth and competence, and (2) do these stereotypical dimensions impact consumer-brand identification and, through it, purchase intentions and brand ownership? The proposed conceptual model is tested using data from two countries (Austria: N = 243; Bosnia & Herzegovina: N = 95) and seven global brands from different product categories. The findings reveal that perceived brand globalness and localness indeed influence the content of brand stereotypes by impacting consumers' assessments of warmth and competence. Brand warmth is revealed to be the key driver of consumer-brand identification which, in turn, stimulates purchase intentions and brand ownership. Brand competence is not significantly related to consumer-brand identification (across both studies), indicating that not all dimensions of stereotype content are relevant for the consumer-brand relationship.

Subfields: Marketing, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7d1bbaf05e53ba0ca95c71a4bcf6b3a1e122b39d

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In Marketing

1. Till Haumann
2. Pascal Güntürkün
3. Sven Mikolon

In Social Psychology

1. Till Haumann
2. Pascal Güntürkün
3. Sven Mikolon

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Till Haumann
2. Pascal Güntürkün
3. Sven Mikolon

Citations in the corpus

• Disentangling the Differential Roles of Warmth and Competence Judgments in Customer-Service Provider Relationships (2020, background): “Similarly, one study on brand stereotypes finds that warmth is more important (Kolbl et al. 2019), whereas other studies on brand (Aaker, Vohs, and Mogilner 2010) and country stereotypes find that competence is more important (Chen, Mathur, and Maheswaran 2014; Halkias, Davvetas, and Diamantopoulos ”