Individual Ethnocentrism Effect on Purchase Intention : A Study of Swedish and Finnish Airline Consumers

Abstract: Abstract  Background: Due to recent geopolitical issues, ethnocentrism has had a noticeable rise. However, the effect of consumer ethnocentrism on purchase intentions has received little prior research. An especially noticeable lack of previous research is within intangible products such as services. The ethnocentric consumer is assumed to be biased towards products and services from his or her own country and reluctant to consume products from abroad. An industry that is often disregarded in business research is the aviation industry. In 2022, Swedish and Finnish airports oversaw a total of approximately fifty-five million passengers, making it a large business with little attention directed towards it. The industry is fragile concerning economic cycles and especially brittle in external challenges such as the covid pandemic. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of consumer ethnocentrism on purchase intentions towards home national airlines through shaping individual perceptions of home national airlines and how this effect is moderated by the status of frequent fliers and gender.  Method: This study uses a quantitative research method, based on an online survey with 132 respondents in Sweden and Finland. We test our research model with seven research hypotheses based on the survey data.  Findings & Contributions: Our findings indicate that individual ethnocentrism directly increases the purchase intention of Swedish and Finnish consumers towards home national airlines and indirectly enhances the purchase intention of Swedish and Finnish airline consumers by increasing consumers’ perceptions. Our study also reveals that the positive effect of individual ethnocentrism on consumer purchase intention towards home national airlines is weaker among frequent fliers. However, our study does not find differences in the effect of individual ethnocentrism between males and females. In terms of research contributions, our thesis gains a better understanding of the effect of individual ethnocentrism on consumers’ purchase intention by investigating the mediators and moderators and contributes to the research on consumer behaviours.