Segmenting young-adult consumers in East Asia and Central and Eastern Europe – The role of consumer ethnocentrism and decision-making styles

© 2019 Elsevier Inc. The article addresses consumer ethnocentrism (CET) and consumer decision-making styles (CDMS) of young-adult consumers. We explore the level of between- and within-regional differences in CDMS in East Asia and Central and Eastern Europe. Drawing on Social identity theory, we explore various “constellations” of young-adult consumers with regards to their CDMS and assess to what extent can we discriminate between various consumer segments based on CET. We test hypotheses on matched samples' survey data from China, Japan, Slovenia and Croatia. Our study confirms low ethnocentric tendencies of young-adult consumers at regional, country and segment levels. We identify diverse CDMS archetypes between and within the respective countries and regions. Inter-regional differences are not bigger than country-level differences. We find weak pair-wise correlations between CET and some CDMS only in the case of Central and Eastern Europe.