最心安处是吾乡：本体安全感威胁对家乡品牌偏好的影响
摘要
<p id="C2">The acceleration of the globalization and the occurrence of trade wars have caused people to be in an insecure state of ontology, that is, people’s ontological security is threatened. Ontological security refers to people’s confidence in the continuity of self-identity and the stability of the surrounding social and physical environment. In the marketing field, some scholars have explored how consumers cope with disruptions when their routine behaviors are disrupted. However, to date, few studies have explored the effects of ontological security threats on consumers’ brand attitudes and the underlying mechanisms. In the current study, we proposed that consumers would prefer their hometown brands when ontological security is threatened. Hometowns can provide people with a sense of security by providing routine daily life and building a personal group identity, thereby recovering their ontological security and increasing the preference for hometown brands. Thus, when people’s ontological security is threatened, they tend to increase their attachment to their hometowns. In addition, we proposed that individuals whose ontological security are threatened can be recovered from natural habitat exposure, and the differences in their hometown brand preferences would be reduced. <p id="C201">One pretest and three formal experiments were conducted to test our hypotheses. In the pretest, we used two scenarios (i.e., economic and cultural globalization) as stimuli to examine whether the scenarios could manipulate the participants’ threat of ontological security. In Experiment 1, we tested the effect by which the threat of ontological security influences consumers’ preferences for hometown brands through a 2 (ontological security: threatened vs. not threatened) × 2 (brand: hometown vs. non-hometown) between-subject design. In Experiment 2, we examined the robustness of the effect found in Experiment 1 and tested the mediating role of hometown attachment through a 3 (th