Immigrant consumer-brand relationships with home-country brands

Chen, Hui (2026) Immigrant consumer-brand relationships with home-country brands. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

This thesis advances understanding of consumer-brand relationships by focusing on consumers with multicultural national dispositions. Today's marketplaces are increasingly multicultural as more individuals now navigate hybrid, shifting, and context-dependent cultural identities. In this context, culture is a broad concept consisting of various levels, such as national, ethnic, and racial. Among these, this research focuses specifically on the national culture. Immigrant consumers are a salient example within national cultural groups, as they often maintain ties to their country of origin while integrating into the host context after moving across national borders. Thus, they typically hold multiple cultural affiliations, giving rise to shifting identity salience. For those who remain strongly connected to their home country or national culture, brands from their country of origin may carry emotional, symbolic, or nostalgic meanings, and brand choice may serve as a way to express a salient cultural identity in a new context. Although both consumer-brand relationships and country of origin have received substantial attention in the marketing literature, little is known about whether consumers with multicultural national dispositions, such as immigrant consumers, form relationships with their home brands, and if so, the nature of such relationships. To address this gap, this research aims to explore the potential existence and nature of immigrant consumer-brand relationships with home brands and identify their nomological framework.
The research adopts an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design, with self-signalling theory and consumer acculturation theory serving as the overarching lenses to organise and interpret the findings. The theoretical development involves two scoping reviews on consumer-brand relationships and country of origin, and a narrative literature review on immigrant consumer behaviour in marketing to gain an in-depth understanding of the key areas, identify the research gap, and build a foundation for the conceptual model. Study 1 uses interviews to explore the existence, nature, formation, and outcomes of immigrant consumer-brand relationships and their home-country brands. Insights from the Study 1 and the literature review inform the conceptual model and hypotheses. Studies 2, 3, and 4 use survey data from three immigrant groups in the UK (Chinese, Turkish, and Polish) to test the proposed hypotheses.
The findings of this thesis provide robust evidence for the existence and nature of immigrant consumer-brand relationships and identify their key drivers, moderators, and outcomes. The quantitative analyses identify four key drivers: brand origin salience and ethnocentrism (distal drivers), and self-congruity and nostalgia (proximal drivers). The stage of consumer acculturation acts as a moderator, weakening the effects of distal drivers on proximal drivers. The outcomes include brand purchase intention, willingness to pay a price premium, WOM persuasion, perceived irreplaceability, sense of belonging, and inner self-expressiveness.
This thesis makes contributions to conceptual development, theory, literature, and practice. It establishes the existence of immigrant consumer-brand relationships with home brands and revisits their nature. It extends self-signalling theory to the context of consumers with multicultural national dispositions (e.g., immigrants), and expands this theory by examining how identity affects their relationships with and consumption of home brands. It also extends consumer acculturation theory by illustrating how the acculturation of immigrant consumers affects their home-brand relationships and consumption. It provides an empirical account of their nomological framework, thereby advancing current knowledge in the research field. In practice, the findings offer useful insights for marketing strategists seeking to build and sustain strong relationships with immigrant consumers in increasingly multicultural marketplaces.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Subjects: H Social Sciences > HF Commerce
• Colleges/Schools: College of Social Sciences > Adam Smith Business School
• Supervisor's Name: Veloutsou, Professor Cleopatra and Kostyk, Alena
• Date of Award: 2026
• Depositing User: Theses Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2026-86278
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 27 Oct 2026 09:42
• Last Modified: 27 Oct 2026 11:16
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.86278
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/86278