Consumers in Western markets are increasingly critical towards globalization and re-embrace local values. Companies thus must decide whether to continue to pursue global branding strategies and/or rejuvenate local branding strategies. To explore the implications of market globalization for consumer preferences, we use signaling theory to investigate the role of perceived brand globalness and localness as signals of brand credibility, related downstream effects and boundary conditions, across two countries with differing levels of globalization. In globalized markets, brand globalness is a weaker signal of brand credibility than brand localness, whereas in globalizing markets, the two signals are of equal importance.
