Countervailing Influences of Consumer Animosity and Nostalgia on Purchasing Decisions

In recent years, consumer animosity has received a lot of attention in international marketing literature (for a review, see Riefler and Diamantopoulos 2007). The construct is conceptually defined as “remnants of antipathy related to previous or ongoing military, political or economic events” (Klein, Ettenson, and Morris 1998, 90) and has been repeatedly found to have a negative effect on consumers’ willingness to buy foreign products (e.g., Klein et al. 1998; Klein 2002; Shimp, Dunn, and Klein 2004). Animosity may also adversely impact product evaluations (Ettenson and Klein 2005; Rose, Rose, and Shoham 2009; Shoham et al. 2006). Its influence has been found to be separate from that of consumer ethnocentrism, namely, the “beliefs held by consumers about the appropriateness and indeed morality of purchasing foreign-made products” (Shimp and Sharma 1987, 280), which has similar effects on foreign product buying behavior (for a review, see Shankarmahesh 2006). In some purchase settings, there may be a countervailing force to animosity, namely nostalgia, reflecting “a preference (general liking, positive attitude, or favorable affect) toward objects (people, places, or things) that were more common (popular, fashionable, or widely circulated) when one was younger (in early adulthood, in adolescence, in childhood, or even before birth” (Holbrook and Schindler 1991, 330). Such settings typically occur when countries that experienced painful long-lasting occupation, become independent. For example, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, dozens of new countries were established where consumers are exposed to products that are closely connected with consumers’ youth and past, but at the same time, they originate in a (now) foreign and disliked country. Under these circumstances, negative attitudes due to animosity may co-exist with positive attitudes due to consumer nostalgia and the question arises as to which construct has the strongest impact on consumer behavior