Understanding the differences of political consumers in Northern, Southern and Eastern Europe

Resumen

Nowadays consumers face an array of brands and offered products, supplied with a constant reminder to purchase. In the new era of information accessibility consumers have an opportunity to make deliberate choices in a marketplace, framing their purchasing decisions accordingly to their values and beliefs. However, the availability of such information may act as a double-edged sword, since along with increase of consumer acquisition it may promote consumption withholding. One field of studying the reasons of consumption withholding is a branch of political consumerism which is called consumer boycott – premeditated refusal to purchase certain product due to political, ethical or other considerations. To prevent financial damage and loss in a company, managers should base their marketing strategies and policy according to consumers’ opinion and point of view. And one of the essential aspects is to reveal target group of customers for each product through examining the profile of those who act as consumers-boycotters. Thus, the main objective of this research is to identify those who boycott products in different geographical clusters of Europe, and compare them among each other. Our task is to reveal which characteristics, if there are any, significantly predict the likelihood of certain person to participate in boycott action in comparison to others. For this purpose we use secondary data from the European Social Survey (2010 – 2013) and analyse them with the help of IBM SPSS Statistics. Additionally to characteristics widely discussed in relevant literature, such as boycotter’s age, gender, level of income and education, and political activity, we analyse new variables which are anticipated to predict customer boycotting behaviour, namely boycotter’s satisfaction with life and satisfaction with the way democracy and government work in country. According to our findings we corroborate the prevalence of boycotting in Scandinavian countries. Furthermore, some of our results confirm findings of past researches, while the others are found to be unexpectedly conflicting. Thus, our research contributes to academic literature by adding important information to the gap of studies on consumer boycotts.