Revitalizing Sustainable Reshoring Brands: Understanding the Customer Perspective on the Roles of Motivation Attributions and the Institutionalization Process

Reshoring can be theorized as a brand-revitalizing process for fostering companies’ ability to create value in the home country. The question of how to maintain sustainable reshoring implementation strategies by developing favourable brand responses is an important but underexplored field. Given that reshoring brand meanings are socially constructed and causally inferenced by consumers, we advocate that a reshoring brand revitalization should begin by understanding what constitutes customers’ attributions to reshoring motives. We identify values-driven, stakeholder-driven and strategic-driven attributions as determinants of the sense of the institutionalization process (brand authenticity, legitimacy and sustainability). These institutional logics comprise drivers that influence brand love and brand advocacy. We conduct an empirical study (n = 1043) in China. The findings indicate that institutionalized reshoring branding activity is significantly influenced by customers’ attributions to underlying reshoring decisions. Reshoring brands that achieve institutional recognition are more likely to generate brand love and advocacy. In addition, our study provides empirical evidence that nostalgia (1) strengthens the influences of stakeholder-driven attributions on brand authenticity and sustainability, (2) inhibits the influence of values-driven attributions on brand authenticity and (3) inhibits the influence of strategic-driven attributions on brand authenticity, legitimacy and sustainability. Reshoring brand managers should consider these connections when designing their reshoring implementation strategies in the home country.