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by Wojciech Trzebiński, SGH Warsaw School of Economics

Despite the increasingly globalized world and a tendency to make generalizations about consumer behavior, marketers and scholars should not forget how meaningful places and cultures are. As a Polish researcher working at the SGH Warsaw School of Economics (Warsaw, Poland), I want to share my impressions on this, based on my recent visit to UNR in September 2024.

Think of young people swiping through social media apps. They are exposed to content that can easily spread over the world. Regardless of whether those young people are from Â鶹ӳ»­ or Poland, as long as they know English, they may acquire and interact with the same social media trends. If such globalized influence determines how those young people respond to marketing, one can expect more and more homogenous consumer behavior patterns worldwide. However, region-specific factors may still play a role because ‒ among others ‒ those young people are also exposed to local older people who can share their traditional values, lifestyle, and way of thinking. To understand such regional factors, it is good to merge research efforts across different cultural perspectives. I’ve been achieving such a merger by collaborating with Prof. James Leonhard from the Department of Marketing, College of Business, UNR.

The interest in sociocultural factors led James and me to study the influence of collectivism on vaccination intent, which was a profound research topic at the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. While James studied how collectivism increased vaccination intent inducing empathy for other people who could potentially be threatened by COVID-19, I focused on how collectivism made people acknowledge social hierarchy, and thus appreciate vaccine technology as a means that was invented, developed, and promoted by high-status social groups as scientists, physicians, and governments. In 2022, James visited SGH and we began to study how people’s perception of a COVID-19 victim as more socially connected with them increased their engagement and health-preventive behavior. Later, when the pandemic ended, I shifted my research focus to sociocultural determinants of technology adoption in AI-based apps and food. Based on samples of Polish young adults, the findings suggested that when an app was presented as of Polish origin, people with a higher Polish identity found the app’s creativity more useful. It seems that technology, manifested by AI-powered creativity, may be considered by consumers as a product of society, so a positive orientation towards society, in the form of social identity, improves consumer response to technology. Other findings pertained to openness to change (which is opposite to cultural conservatism), showing that people who were more open to change perceived themselves as more congruent with high-tech food, and, in turn, intended to use that food more. Again, those results emphasize that consumer behavior is socioculturally determined.  I had an opportunity to present those results to the UNR faculty and discuss them during my visit to UNR.

My visit allowed James and me to conduct a pilot study on how young Americans respond to products labeled as European vs. Polish. This distinction is practically relevant because producers from countries belonging to the European Union, such as Poland, can choose which product labelling (European or national) they apply. We tested stimuli that successfully made the experimental participants perceive Europe as more distant vs. close in spatial terms (e.g., the message stated that “Europe is relatively distant from Â鶹ӳ»­ as compared with California or Utah” vs. “Europe is relatively close to Â鶹ӳ»­ as compared with Australia”). We observed that such an intervention changed how female participants responded to product labelling. Specifically, their intent to buy and recommend products with European labelling was higher when the intervention suggested that Europe was distant. Perhaps, they positively reacted to the match between a large distance from Europe and more general information about a European product. Although those pilot results call for further investigation (also, to understand why women reacted differently to men), they have already shed new light on how the response to products may be determined by regional factors.

During my visit to UNR, I had the great pleasure of discussing the regional specificity of Central European markets with the UNR American Marketing Association students. I proposed that ‒ due to Central Europe’s location between the Western and Eastern world ‒ the behavioral patterns of Central European consumers are largely determined by several social tensions, such as antagonisms versus countries outside and inside Central Europe, European vs. national identities, and resistance to foreign influences vs. Western aspirations. As this topic was new to the students, I hope that bringing that perspective might encourage them to market in Central Europe and, more broadly, other distant regions.

During my visit, I was impressed by the openness to the regional and sociocultural contexts, even those originating from such a far country as Poland. In this case, a large geographical distance seems to bring curiosity and facilitate collaboration.