David Bourdin, Teaching & Research Associate at the Competence Center for Marketing at FHWien der WKW, explains in a press interview how consumers can perceive global brands.
David Bourdin, Teaching & Research Associate at the Competence Center for Marketing at FHWien der WKW was interviewed by “Die Presse” last week about “Global business with local clichés” (published in the print edition on February 22, 2020).
He explains that corporate giants such as Ikea can be perceived by consumers as both “global” and “local”. In his current study, he shows that locally adapted brands are always perceived as more positive, even if there are prejudices against the brand’s country of origin. He justifies this with the theory of social identity, which states that people always favor their own ‘ingroup’ over a foreign ‘outgroup’.
In his research, Bourdin also addresses the issue of interculturality and examines the influence of different accents of employees on the willingness of customers to actively participate in service processes. The result shows that negative accents due to prejudice reduce trust in service personnel and thus influence consumer behavior. Companies can counteract this by promoting language courses, since the acoustic comprehensibility of foreign-language staff has a very positive effect on customer participation.
Find a selection of his research work here.