Consumer’s Choices in Critical Conditions: How impulsive buying tendency makes consumers seek foreign products

The COVID-19 pandemic brought the attention of researchers to impulsive buying behaviors and the purchasing of local products, as they are fundamental for the economic recovery of the countries. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to identify how the consumer’s impulsive buying tendencies influence their choices for foreign products. We applied the Impulsive Buying Tendency Scale and the X-Scale of Xenocentrism to 300 young and adults. To analyze the data, we conducted a PLS-SEM analysis to test five hypotheses. Our results from the path analysis indicate that the affective aspects of impulsive buying tendency decrease the cognitive IBT (β= -0.345), and increases the foreign admiration (β= 0,265) and domestic rejection (β= 0,226). Moreover, the cognitive aspect of IBT can also increase domestic rejection (β= 0,196). Our results follow the theory regarding xenocentrism, as consumers cognitively will consider foreign products as superior, thus rejecting the domestic ones. Furthermore, affective has also a significant impact on domestic rejection, which indicates that consumers may disregard local products because of individual frustrations.  Overall, businesses need to take into account that to conquer those impulsive buyers, they need to show that they are more global and reinforce the product features. Research on the seek for foreign products and impulsive behavior will be fundamental as this purchasing can help the countries in the economic recovery after the COVID-19 crisis.