The effect of ethnocentrism and lifestyle on clothing preferences of university students: The case of Turkey and Chad

Consumer ethnocentrism is a term widely used by scientific research and marketing professionals. This concept states that people tend to prefer products produced in their own country to foreign products. Understanding consumer choices is a very important element in studies in the marketing discipline. Because today's consumers make a choice according to very different factors when purchasing a product. This also means that consumer preferences are influenced by the consumer's standard of living or lifestyle. The aim of this study is to reveal the effects of ethnocentrism and lifestyle on university students' clothing preferences and to make a comparative analysis between consumers in Chad and Turkey in this context. For this purpose, an online survey was carried out to collect data and 301 participants were reached with convenience sampling. Then the data was analyzed with the SPSS 23.0 program. Fundamental statistical analysis, factor analysis and regression analysis were applied to reveal the relationships between the variables. The results obtained after the analysis show that the tendency of ethnocentrism has a negative effect on the clothing preference of Turkish students, but not for students from Chad. According to the results of the analysis, lifestyle was gathered in four different dimensions: innovators, status-oriented, thinkers and leaders. In the Chad sample, innovativeness and status tendency had a positive effect on clothing preference, while in the Turkish consumers sample, only the innovativeness variable had a significant positive effect on clothing preference. Keywords: Ethnocentrism, Lifestyle, Apparel Products, University students