Twenty-Five Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall: An Empirical Revisit of West German Consumers’ Attitudes Toward Products and Brands from Former East Germany Zafar Uddin Ahmed a , Wolfgang Hinck b , and Reto Felix c a American University of Ras Al Khaimah, Ras Al Khaimah, United Arab Emirates; b Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd University, Al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia; c The University of Texas – Rio Grande Valley, Rio Grande, Texas, USA ABSTRACT More than 25 years after the German reunification, data show that products/brands from the eastern regions of Germany (“Neue L€ ander”) still do not have significant shares in the country’s western part (“Alte L€ ander”). To analyze potential reasons for this phenomenon, our current study replicates a previous study that investigated selected attitudes of Alte L€ ander consumers toward products/brands from the Neue L€ ander. It is shown that factors such as consumer ethnocentrism, product judgment, willingness to buy, and economic animosity continue to influence consumer behavior and as such our study offers potential explanation for the failure of Neue L€ ander products/brands in the western regions of Germany. KEYWORDS German reunification; East Germany; West Germany; consumer attitudes; consumer ethnocentrism; product judgment; willingness to buy; animosity; consumer behavior; brands and products; promotion Introduction When the Berlin Wall separating East and West Germany fell in November 1989, manufacturers and distributors from both the German Democratic Republic (here- after: Neue L€ ander) and the Federal Republic of Germany (hereafter: Alte L€ ander) quickly began expanding their business operations into each other’s markets. How- ever, whereas companies from the Alte L€ ander quickly succeeded in the Eastern markets (Haendel, 1991; Lay, 1997; Lindgens, 2009; Schmoll, 1996), Neue L€ ander companies’ activities in the West remained underdeveloped and unsuccessful, reaching penetration levels that can only be considered insignificant (Schmoll, 1996; Mueller, 1997; The Economist, 2002; Banchelli, 2008; Errichiello & Zschiesche, 2013). Two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, out of 700 major brands that existed in the Neue L€ ander before the reunification, only about 120 (or 17%) have survived, and only a few of them are distributed across the Alte L€ ander; CONTACT Zafar Uddin Ahmed zafar.ahmed@aurak.ac.ae Professor of Marketing School of Business, Ameri- can University of Ras Al Khaimah, P. O. Box 10021, Ras Al Khaimah, United Arab Emirates. © 2018 Taylor & Francis JOURNAL OF PROMOTION MANAGEMENT 2018, VOL. 0, NO. 0, 1–16 https://doi.org/10.1080/10496491.2017.1408529