Presenting a Scale for Customer Clustering in Domestic Product Preference; a Case Study in Automotive Industry

In a year named as "Supporting Iranian Goods", more attention has to be paid to the tendency of preferring domestic products. The present study, for the recognition of different groups of consumers in terms of the preference for domestic products, has offered a new scale in order to identify not only one category, but different categories of consumers. In this mixed method research, firstly a new scale has been developed by academic experts’ selection among the items designed to identify three groups of ethnocentric, cosmopolitan, and xenocentric consumers and by experts’ reformation for new purpose. Then, the new scale has been tested in the context of Iran’s automotive industry. Based on a cluster analysis, 558 analyzable questionnaires were first grouped into two categories, namely, prone to foreign car preference and prone to domestic car preference. The weaknesses of such classification were minimized by classifying customers into five categories. Based on our finding, no cluster characterizing ethnocentric consumers was formed. A cluster identified as the fans of domestic but dissatisfied with the products of an industry, which in previous research and in the division of customers into two categories, was the source of the theory's contradiction with the market reality. Besides offering proposals tailored to each category in line with "supporting Iranian goods", constant pursuit of cluster changes in various industries is suggested.