CONSUMER ATTITUDE TOWARDS LOCALLY ASSEMBLED VERSUS JAPANESE VEHICLES: EVIDENCE FROM EMPLOYEES IN THE ETHIOPIAN GOVERNMENT BANKING SECTOR

Abstract

One outcome of globalization has been increased competition between domestic and multinational firms in both foreign and domestic markets. This study was conducted to analyze consumer attitude and ethnocentrism tendency towards locally assembled and imported Japanese cars among government bank employees in Addis Ababa market. In order to attain its objectives the study took selected employees of commercial bank of Ethiopia as a sample. A structural questioner has been distributed to 238 randomly selected samples but analysis was made based on the data collected from 199 respondents. Analysis and interpretation of the data was conducted by using descriptive and inferential statistical tools with the help of statistical package for social science 20.0. The finding of this research indicates that when making purchase decisions for vehicles, CBE employees consider quality as the most important attribute with safety and brand as being the second and the third most important attributes. And also most respondents of CBE consider country of assembly information important while making purchase decisions for vehicles. CBE employees show less ethnocentric tendency towards locally assembled cars. The findings further indicate that CBE employees’ ethnocentrism found to be positively correlated to consumer attitude towards domestically assembled vehicles with low degree of ethnocentrism. And, CBE employees’ ethnocentrism and their attitude towards Japanese vehicle correlate negative with a medium magnitude.