The drivers of global brand attitude: a three-country study

Even during the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression, global organisations have continued to grow their global brand value by 2% from 2007 to 2008 to $1.95 trillion (Clark, 2009). The growth of global brands has created a need for global organisations to understand consumers better in hopes of increasing their global market share. However, past research has largely ignored the drivers of consumers' global brand attitude. This study investigated several proposed antecedents to global brand attitude. Prior research had suggested global consumption orientation, cosmopolitanism, consumer ethnocentrism and materialism were important antecedents to global brand attitude. However, past research explained very little of the variance in global brand attitude (e.g., Alden et al., 2006; Dimofte et al., 2008). Consequently, this study added global company attitude and perceived global brand value as two additional drivers of global brand attitude. To explore the proposed antecedents of global brand attitude a model was developed and tested in Germany, Brazil and South Korea, three countries which differ dramatically in their cultures and level of development. The study found that, in all three countries, perceived global brand value and global company attitude were significant drivers of global brand attitudes, while materialism was an influence on global brand attitudes. In South Korea and Brazil, cosmopolitanism was a significant indirect driver, but not in Germany. Further, consumer ethnocentrism was only a marginal influence in South Korea, whereas there was no influence in Brazil and Germany. Finally, in all three countries, global consumption orientation had no impact on global brand attitudes.