This article focuses on belief in brands as a passport to global citizenship, defined as a person's perception that global brands create an imagined global identity. The authors assess the effects of this belief on the importance consumers assign to branded products and also examine the antecedent effects of cultural openness and consumer ethnocentrism. Their work focuses on the global youth market in the developing countries of Romania, Ukraine, and Russia and the developed U.S. market. The findings contribute to a broadened understanding of branding in a global marketplace by examining the associations between beliefs about global brands and the importance consumers attach to branded products in their daily lives.

Objective: To test whether alcohol advertising expenditures and the degree of exposure to alcohol advertisements affect alcohol consumption by youth.Design: Longitudinal panel using telephone surveys. Participants: Individuals aged 15 to 26 years were randomly sampled within households and households within media markets. Markets were systematically selected from the top 75 media markets, representing 79% of the US population. The baseline refusal rate was 24%. Sample sizes per wave were 1872, 1173, 787, and 588. Data on alcohol advertising expenditures on television, radio, billboards, and newspapers were collected.Main Exposures: Market alcohol advertising expenditures per capita and self-reported alcohol advertising exposure in the prior month.Main Outcome Measure: Self-reported number of alcoholic drinks consumed in the prior month.Results: Youth who saw more alcohol advertisements on average drank more (each additional advertisement seen increased the number of drinks consumed by 1% [event rate ratio, 1.01; 95% confidence interval, 1.01-1.02]). Youth in markets with greater alcohol advertising expenditures drank more (each additional dollar spent per capita raised the number of drinks consumed by 3% [event rate ratio, 1.03; 95% confidence interval, 1.01-1.05]). Examining only youth younger than the legal drinking age of 21 years, alcohol advertisement exposure and expenditures still related to drinking. Youth in markets with more alcohol advertisements showed increases in drinking levels into their late 20s, but drinking plateaued in the early 20s for youth in markets with fewer advertisements. Control variables included age, gender, ethnicity, high school or college enrollment, and alcohol sales. Conclusion:Alcohol advertising contributes to increased drinking among youth.

Consumers around the world are choosing between local versus global brands in the marketplace. The authors draw on the dual-drivers theory of consumer choice and global consumer culture theory to offer a sociocultural-historical perspective on purchases of local (relative to global) brands. Their framework focuses on two local-global consumer values (ethnocentrism and global connectedness) and the identity-and quality-signaling functions of local (relative to global) brands. The authors argue for a contingency approach such that the effects of these local-global consumer values are moderated by country level of economic development and product category symbolism. This research uses consumer-level data (n = 2,197) and country-level data (from Euromonitor's Global Market Information Database) from seven countries (Australia, Brazil, China, India, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States). They find that purchases of local (relative to global) brands are predicated on local-global consumer values, mediated by perceptions of the identity function of local (relative to global) brands, and moderated by the country's level of economic development and product category symbolism.

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