“Consumer ethnocentrism, cosmopolitanism, product judgment, and foreign product purchase intention: An empirical study in Vietnam”

This study aims to determine the relationship between consumer ethnocentrism, consumer cosmopolitanism, imported product judgment, and foreign product purchase intention in Vietnam. This paper tries to present its results empirically, which might be helpful in preparing a strategy for Vietnamese customers’ international purchasing behavior to increase competition at retail companies in Vietnam. It uses a questionnaire with a purposive random sampling of 311 customers in Vietnam. Analysis was conducted through a quantitative descriptive analysis, measurement of variable dimensions on the questionnaire using a seven-point Likert scale, and partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to test the hypotheses. This study found that imported product judgment, consumer cosmopolitanism, social influence, and perceived behavioral control positively influence foreign product purchase intention, whereas customer ethnocentrism has a negative impact on that intention. The association between consumer cosmopolitanism and foreign product purchase intention is mediated by imported product evaluation and consumer ethnocentrism. At the same time, national identity does not affect consumer ethnocentrism and foreign product purchase intentions. Besides, this study offers some managerial implications for marketers in decisions linked to Vietnamese customers’ international purchasing behavior to increase competition in the domestic market.


LITERATURE REVIEW
The social identity theory put out by Tajfel and Turner (1979) is based on research on social categorization, motivation, cognitive factors, and relationships between groups.According to Huang et al. (2010), the suggested social identity theory might illuminate the reasons behind consumer ethnocentrism.The central philosophy of social identity theory is that people feel desirable and eager to construct positive identities for themselves, as indicated by their identification with a variety of organizations (Tajfel, 1981).This theory is often used to infer the relationship between consumer ethnocentrism, national identity, consumer cosmopolitanism, and foreign product purchase intention.
The shortcomings of Fishbein and Ajzen's (1975) theory of reasoned action (TRA) led to the development of the theory of planned behavior (TPB).The limitation of TRA is that human behavior is completely controlled by reason (according to TRA, the two factors affecting behavioral intention are attitudes and subjective norms).Therefore, Ajzen (1991) proposed a theoretical model of planned behavior based on the extended development of TRA.In his new theory, Ajzen (1991) suggested that three elements affect the behavior (in this example, the purchase intention): the behavior's attitude, the subjective norm, and the perception of behavioral control.In practice, the TPB has been used to predict many types of behavior and behavioral intentions and has brought about much success.
The notion of consumer cosmopolitanism originates from the disciplines of social psychology and anthropology and is increasingly applied in marketing and management (Cleveland et al., 2011).In fact, people with consumer cosmopolitanism often judge products based on value rather than their origin (Cleveland et al., 2009).Consumer cosmopolitanism is even more widespread in developing countries because imported products are judged to be of better quality than domestic products (Riefler, 2017).Additionally, Parts and Vida (2013), Sousa et al. (2018), and Nguyen et al. (2021) have also proved this assumption.
Imported product judgment is a general concept that refers to an aggregate assessment of the image of overseas goods, including the proficiency of workers, technological progress, prices, initiatives, samples, design, durability, and quality ( Klein et al., 1998).According to Parts and Vida (2013), the influence of the propensity to acquire the imported product (cosmopolitanism) on its (the product) value judgment is rarely tested.Multiple research efforts have indicated that consumer ethnocentrism exerts an impact on an imported product value judgment, such as Haque et al. (2015), Klein (2002), Yoo and Donthu (2005), and Parts and Vida (2013).Ethnocentrism has a negative impact on the quality of foreign products, while the quality of foreign products afterward has a positive impact on consumers' intentions to purchase the items (Ettenson & Klein, 2005).
Purchase intention is the readiness to act at the ideal moment preserved in human memory (Ajzen, 2008).Elbeck and Tirtiroglu (2008) described foreign product purchase intentions as a customer's willingness to purchase an imported product.Foreign products are goods manufactured and assembled overseas and imported to Vietnam.Kaynak and Kara (2002), assessing the quality of imported products, showed that the country of manufacture has an impact on the perception of product attributes.Bruning (1997) also shows that the impression of the country of manufacture significantly affects the consumer assessment of the quality of a product.Besides, the value assessment is also considered to have a moderating role for foreign product purchase intention.According to Rawwas et al. (1996), consumer cosmopolitanism can deliver a better value perception of imported products (Parts & Vida, 2013).
National identity is a collection of intangible assets that belong to one culture and are separate from others.Keillor et al. (1996) argue that individuals reveal a strong national identity when they are associated with religion, history, and cultural aspects, exhibit a strong sense of uniqueness, and are proud of their nation.Many scholars have tested the national identity scale, such as Chi Cui and Adams (2002) in Yemen and Thelen and Honeycutt (2004)  Ethnocentrism is a concept used mainly in social psychology.This concept states that the views of members of the same group are considered central to everything, and all views of the other groups are considered unimportant ( Sumner, 1906).When applying the above concept to marketing (consumer behavior), Shimp and Sharma (1987) have developed the concept of consumer ethnocentrism.Accordingly, consumer ethnocentrism refers to consumer beliefs on the morality and rationality of using imports (Shimp & Sharma, 1987), which results in consumers' inclination to choose home goods over imported ones (Balabanis & Diamantopoulos, 2016).The higher the ethnocentrism of consumers, the more restrictive they are to buy foreign products (Abosag & Farah, 2014).Consumer ethnocentrism will lead to biased behaviors in the evalu-ation of domestic and imported products, with a preference for domestic ones and unwillingness to purchase the imported ones.The relationship between consumer ethnocentrism and foreign product purchase intention is also investigated across markets, such as in Bangladesh (Haque et al., 2015), Saudi Arabic (Abosag & Farah, 2014), Vietnam (Nguyen et al., 2021;Nguyen et al., 2008), Croatia (Maksan et al., 2019), Estonia and Slovenia (Parts & Vida, 2013), and Malaysia (Tabassi et al., 2012).
Social influence is the impact of social surroundings on how people behave of individuals (Ajzen, 2008).The social influence factor can be measured through people related to consumers (such as family, friends, or colleagues) who will support or oppose foreign product purchase intentions.Social influence is used to justify why buyers want to purchase goods from other countries (Van et al., 2021).
Perceived behavioral control is one's belief about how difficult or easy to carry out a certain behavior (Ajzen, 2008).The more resources and opportunities a person thinks he or she possesses, the fewer constraints he or she anticipates and, therefore, the greater the control over his or her behavior.Controlling factors can be internal (skills or knowledge) or external (time, price, opportunity, or dependence on others).The theory of perceived behavior explains why customers want to acquire foreign items (Van et al., 2021;Trung & Lan, 2022).
This study proposes a research model concerning the link between consumer ethnocentrism, consumer cosmopolitanism, and purchase intentions for foreign products, as shown in Figure 1.
The following hypotheses are established based on the literature review and empirical evidence: H1: Consumer cosmopolitanism has a positive relationship with foreign product purchase intentions.
H2: Consumer cosmopolitanism has a negative relationship with consumer ethnocentrism.
H3: Consumer cosmopolitanism has a positive relationship with imported product judgment.H4: Imported product judgment has a positive relationship with foreign product purchase intentions.
H5: National identity has a positive relationship with consumer ethnocentrism.
H6: National identity has a negative relationship with foreign product purchase intentions.
H7: Consumer ethnocentrism has a negative relationship with foreign product purchase intentions.
H8: Social influence has a positive relationship with foreign product purchase intentions.
H9: Perceived behavioral control has a positive relationship with foreign product purchase intentions.

METHODS
This study builds a survey questionnaire with relevant scales suitable for Vietnam.Based on the translation process proposed by Craig and Douglas (2005), the scales are translated and checked.Then, the draft questionnaire is discussed with the group discussion method (group of 20 members) to check the appropriateness of the statements and correct (add or remove) any questions that are not relevant to this study.
A seven-point Likert scale, spanning from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree), was employed in this study's quantitative research methodology to measure the key questionnaire items.This study used a convenience sampling technique.The data analysis method is conducted through six steps: (1) Assessing the model for multicollinearity, (2) Assessing the significance and relationships of structural model paths, (3) Evaluating the coefficient of determination R Finally, for the foreign product purchase intentions, Mathur's (1999) scale consists of four observed variables, coded FPI1-FPI4.

RESULTS
The sample comprises students and workers in Vietnam.There are 311 people, including 57% female and 43% male respondents.In the age group, the majority were from 18 to 25 Fornell and Larcker (1981), these observed variables do not meet the requirements.Therefore, the study removed these three observed variables from the scale of consumer ethnocentrism and retested the measurement model for the second time.
The results of the second scale reliability test are shown in Table 1.Table 1 shows that all scales have reliable Cronbach's alpha (CA), composite reliability (CR), and average variance extracted (AVE), so no observed variables are excluded from the scale.
Through testing factor loading, the results show that the factor loading of all factors is greater than Discriminant validity is the degree of discrimination between the concept of a specific latent variable and the concept of other latent variables ( Henseler et al., 2009).According to the findings, each concept's average variance extracted (AVE) square value is larger than the correlation coefficients between the corresponding variables.As a result, the research model's concepts gain discriminant validity (Table 2).
In addition, the study tests the heterotrait-monotrait ratio (HTMT) to assess the discriminant validity of the scale.Table 3 shows that the HTMT indicators are all smaller than 0.9, showing that the concepts are distinct from each other ( Hu & Bentler, 1999).
SRMR indicators are the difference between the actual data part and the predicted model part.
Table 4 shows that the predictive model fits the data.The research used the partial least squares path model (PLS-PM) approach to test the appropriateness of the structural model using the PLS algorithm provided by SmartPLS 3.3.9(Henseler et al., 2009).Significance tests for the parameters in the model were performed by the 5000-times PLS bootstrapping method.The specific normalized path coefficients are shown in Figure 2, with further details of the results shown in Table 6.

DISCUSSION
Research  (2013) show that nationalism has a positive influence on domestic product purchase intentions when the relationship is reversed by replacing the concept of foreign product purchase intentions.However, there is not enough statistical evidence to assess this impact; thus, further studies are required to retest this relationship.

CONCLUSION
This study has clarified the relationship between consumer ethnocentrism, consumer cosmopolitanism, imported product judgment, and foreign product purchase intention in Vietnam.The study offers the following policy recommendations based on the data processing outcomes and the findings.Firstly, the government needs to build and perfect systems of product quality standards, with quality inspection, supervision, and strong enough sanctions to protect genuine enterprises and eliminate illegal behavior violating business ethics, thereby improving the quality of domestic goods.Second, it is necessary to build a transparent and reasonable financial mechanism for research programs to realize high-quality research for the sake of domestic production.Third, there should be preferential tax policies in place for domestic enterprises to import machinery, equipment, production materials, spare parts, and accessories to serve the domestic market and supporting industries.Finally, one should coordinate with business associations to develop and implement a strategy to create and develop quality domestic raw materials to gradually reduce dependence on imports.
Notwithstanding contributions to literature, this study still has a few limitations to be kept in mind, necessitating future research considerations.First, the sample size is relatively small, so it is difficult to fully represent the purchase intention of Vietnamese consumers.Future studies should retest with a larger sample and wider distribution.Second, the number of variables affecting foreign product purchase intentions is relatively small, which requires further research.Third, another limitation is that the study is constrained to surveying imported products fully manufactured and assembled in foreign developed countries.Further studies need to clearly define Vietnamese consumers' intention to purchase foreign products from specific developed or even developing countries.The research item in this paper is consumer goods; it is possible that for other products, such as medical and high-tech products, consumers will have different behavioral intentions.
in Russia.Auruskeviciene et al. (2012) and Dmitrovic et al. (2009) only used the concept of cultural homogeneity to represent national identity and tested the relationship between this scale and the ethnocentrism scale.The results show that the hypothesis is supported in Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Italy, but the results are the opposite when tested in Montenegro.Besides, Le et al. (2013) and Trung and Lan (2022) have examined the relationship between national identity and behavioral intention and assessed the intermediate role of consumer ethnocentrism.
years old with 59%.Next, 33% are from 26 to 40 years old, and 2% are over 60 years old.The majority have college or university degrees (59%).In terms of monthly income, the group with an income range of 400-600 USD and the group with an income range of 600-800 USD have the same rate of 19.4%.
Average variance extracted (AVE), composite reliability (CR), and Cronbach's alpha are used to test the scale's dependability.The initial reliability test of the scale's results reveals that the factor loading coefficients for CET4, CET5, and CET6 are less than 0.7; according to

Table 1 .
Construct reliability and validity

Table 5
shows the results of R 2 and R 2 adjusted.

Table 5 .
Results R-square and R-square adjusted