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ABSTRACT

This study investigates the effect of country-of-origin image on consumers’ evaluations of foreign products and disaggregates the effects across facets of country image and across product classes. We disentangle country image into cognitive and affective dimensions, and additionally disaggregate the cognitive dimension into geographic and human aspects. We positthat country-of-origin effects will vary across distinct facets of country image and that the effect of each facet of country image will vary across different classes of products. By means of an online survey, data were collected from French consumers regarding their perceptions of cognitive and affective aspects of two countries – Brazil and Germany – and their evaluation of three product classes – utilitarian nature-based, utilitarian industrialized and hedonic industrialized – which were represented respectively by fruits, home appliances and clothes. Empirical results partially corroborate the hypothesized contingent impacts.

7. Discussion Our findings on the differential impacts of CoI dimensions across product classes suggest that CoI effects should be investigated at the dimensions’ level (not as aggregated effects of a more abstract construct) and that they may not be fully compensatory (as also argued by Wang, Li, Barnes, & Ahn, 2012). Similarly to Witt and Rao’s (1992) findings, our results show that the overall CoI effect (as indicated by R2 in the columns about the differences approach in Table 3) is smaller on clothes than on home appliances (or on fruits in general, for that matter), but the differences were not statistically significant, at least in our sample. Additionally, similarly to Eroglu and Machleit (1989), who found that the CoO effect was higher on technologically advanced products, our results indicate that the overall explained variance of product evaluation of home appliances (a more advanced product; explained variance equal to 41%) is higher than that of fruits (25%) or that of clothes (16%). However, our findings challenge Brijs et al.’s (2011) contention that the effects of CoI would be stronger for hedonic-oriented than for utilitarian-oriented products.