Based on historical backgrounds between Korea and Japan, their political relationships, and Japan's continued efforts to express its territorial ambitions on Dokdo island, this paper tries to identify key factors influencing Korean consumers’ purcha...
Based on historical backgrounds between Korea and Japan, their political relationships, and Japan's continued efforts to express its territorial ambitions on Dokdo island, this paper tries to identify key factors influencing Korean consumers’ purchase intension on Japanese products, which have a strong negative country-of-origin. In addition, we attempt to empirically examine it by categorizing the products into high- and low-priced articles and goods produced by international joint ventures (i.e., Toyota and Lexus cars as a costly article, Uniqlo and ABC mart as a low-end goods, and Daiso as a product produced by international joint ventures). This paper collects data by using a survey method and runs both Spearman rank order correlations and multiple regressions According to the results, we uncover three findings. First, consumers, who possess the lack of patriotism, tend to purchase high- and low-priced Japanese articles. Second, consumers, armed with high patriotism, have a propensity not to buy goods and services provided by even Daiso, which represents cost effectiveness. Third, Korean consumers are likely to buy Japanese products due to their high quality, relative satisfactory low price and their corporate image. These findings theoretically contribute to stakeholder perspective and offer valuable implications to Korean consumers and firms competing against Japanese products. In particular, the value of this paper resides in the fact that it asks Korean consumers to rethink what they should do as an important stakeholder in the Korean market.