Country images: do they really matter? Critical reflections and empirical evidence rehabilitating the importance and understanding of country-of-origin effects

Abstract

Numerous academics and marketeers remain sceptical about the relevance of research on county-of-origin (coo) effects. This criticism is nurtured by a substream of studies suggesting that coo-cues operate as determinants of people's attitude towards products only to a marginal extent. Yet, this paper shows that results already reported should be interpreted with care. Interestingly, classic empirical approaches seem to capture only fragments of the coo-effect while they work with limited conceptions of the key-variable (i.e., 'country image'). We conducted a large-scale field survey to tackle this problem. Our study indicates how a completed country image-construct significantly increases the impact of coo-effects and enhances our theoretical understanding of this phenomenon. More in detail we established that country-specific cognitions, feelings and behavioural intentions co-operate in determining the formation of product-specific beliefs, evaluation and purchase intentions.