Poles eager to support local companies

Consumer patriotism has not reached such a scale in a long time ago, when fighting coronavirus, according to a study commissioned by Koral, a private Polish family company and also the largest ice cream producer in Poland, in cooperation with the Research Institute "ARC Rynek i Opinia". Over 60 percent of Poles declare their willingness to help Polish companies, and 90 percent of them promise support through the more frequent purchase of products and services from our country. In the group of those declaring help, there are mostly women and people aged over 45.

The coronavirus worldwide pandemic forced us to be locked up in our homes for the good of all of us. We need to find ourselves again in the existing conditions in which we take full care of children, deal with their education, and at the same time face our fear and the constant sense of threat. It would seem that in such a situation, each of us will focus on selfishness, lock ourselves in the house and take care of our own comfort. Meanwhile, a need for help arose in society – large and small companies support hospitals and medical environments, and ordinary people sew masks, take care of lonely quarantined persons, or organize support for Polish producers and entrepreneurs to maintain companies with which they are associated.

"Coral has been operating in Poland for over 40 years and we are pleased that Poles are paying more and more attention to Polish products because caring for the locality is our priority. There is not only a big producer behind the product but also suppliers, logistics and sellers,” Piotr Gąsiorowski, Marketing Director at PPL Koral, said.

The Koral brand also decided to check how consumers' shopping habits changed after the outbreak. Research has shown that more than half of Poles have started buying Polish products more often than before. Interestingly, such behavior is more often declared by women than men.

"Under normal circumstances, the phenomenon of consumer ethnocentrism, according to which a narrow group of people chose Polish products, was associated with age, education level and income. In the situation of an outbreak of coronavirus, the prevailing fear turned out to be a stronger mechanism motivating consumers to take action than ethnocentrism. We began to appreciate what we can lose, take care of consumer choices,” dr hab. Alicja Grochowska, professor at SWPS University, explains.

(WBJ)