A Comparative Case Study of Global Marketing and Ethnocentrism ...

The E-scale was developed in 1950 and is hailed as the first scale ever to
accurately represent a measure of ethnocentrism. It uses a questionnaire method and a
Likert-type scale. It poses all questions in a negative format. That is, all items were
hostile to the group in question (Adorno, et al 104-105). However, it is a bit outdated
in its approach, as it was developed for the purpose of measuring classic attitudes of
racism and ethnicity. Some feel it is even inappropriate for the contemporary
American situation (Shimp and Sharma 281).
A more recent scale, based in part on the E-scale, is the CETSCALE
constructed by Shimp and Sharma, both professors of marketing in the College of
Business Administration at the University of South Carolina. The scale was developed
as the first ever to accurately measure consumer ethnocentrism in America (280).
Shimp and Sharma characterize this scale as a measure of ethnocentric “tendency”
rather than “attitude” because the latter term suggests a greater degree of object
specificity than the CETSCALE is intended to capture (Shimp and Sharma 281).
Shimp and Sharma felt that it was necessary to construct a unique scale that
would measure ethnocentrism differently than had ever been done before. The classic
measure of ethnocentrism developed by Adorno is not directly relevant to consumer
behavior, therefore Shimp and Sharma set out to create a better, more timely and
relevant model to study marketing phenomena specifically (Shimp and Sharma 281).
The CETSCALE was tested against specific facts of consumers’ orientations toward
foreign products: (1) consumer ethnocentric tendencies, (2) price-value perceptions,
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