The relationship between consumer animosity and the country-of-origin effect with the global brand preference of consumers: A comparative analysis on Afyonkarahisar and İzmir cities

The concept of global brand preference has an important place both in the marketing activities of the global companies and in the preferences of consumers. Consumer animosity and the country of origin effect are among the factors that affect the preferences of consumers. As firms shape their marketing activities according to these factors, consumers also benefit from these factors in their preferences. Thereby, consumer animosity and the country of origin effect are concepts that need to be learned and examined by both firms and consumers. In this study, the relevance between consumer animosity and country of origin effect with global brand preference of consumers was analysed. Accordingly, university students who are in Afyonkarahisar and Izmir provinces were chosen as the sample of the research. The reason why two different provinces are chosen is to test whether the consumer animosity levels of consumers in different provinces will be different from each other or not. In the study France and China were determined for the target countries of consumer animosity. As global brand categories clothing, automobile and cosmetics have been determined for each country. The data of the study were collected as 407 from Afyonkarahisar and 408 from Izmir sample by online questionnaire study. According to results of the research it was concluded that the students in Afyonkarahisar have higher consumer animosity feelings than students in Izmir. In addition, it was concluded that total consumer animosity in both Afyonkarahisar and Izmir provinces negatively affected the global brand preference of France and China.