Country equity and country branding: Problems and prospects
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NICOLAS PAPADOPOULOS AND LOUISE HESLOP Dr Papadopoulos is Professor of Marketing and International Business and Dr Heslop is Professor of Marketing, both at the Eric Sprott School of Business, Carleton University, in Ottawa, Canada. The authors specialise, respectively, on issues of international marketing strategy and consumer behaviour. Together they have been involved in research and have published extensively on the theme of this paper since the early 1980s, and are co-coordinators of the IKON Research Group which involves numerous academics and students in a variety of cross-national studies on product-country images.
Abstract This paper surveys and reviews the voluminous research on product-country images and their effects, with the objectives of discussing the multi-faceted nature of country equity and its importance, and identifying knowledge gaps and misconceptions that often impede the development of successful business or national strategies based on effective country branding. The paper concludes that country-based marketing is often underused or misdirected due to inadequate understanding of the meaning of ‘country branding’, and suggests approaches for strategy development as well as pointing to knowledge gaps that call for additional research.
INTRODUCTION 1
Dr Nicolas Papadopoulos Eric Sprott School of Business, Carleton University, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, K1S 5B6, Canada Tel: ⫹1 613 731-6065; Fax: ⫹1 613 731-7572; E-mail: nick_papadopoulos@ carleton.ca
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As early as 1987, Tan and Farley called a product’s ‘country of origin’, or its product-country image (PCI), and its potential effects the ‘most-researched’ issue in international buyer behaviour. Recent estimates have placed the number of published journal and conference papers in this area at ‘just below’2 or ‘over’3 200, which would be considered sizeable in any case — but in fact these figures understate reality by a significant margin. As will be discussed below in more detail, a comprehensive and exhaustive database, developed systematically by the authors’ research group, shows that research in this area is formidable indeed: it consists of over 750 major publications, by more than 780 authors, over the past 40 years or so. However, research volume does not
necessarily bring understanding and, especially, know-how that can be operationalised. The opening paragraph of the call for papers for this special issue of the Journal of Brand Management is rightly cautious when it states (emphasis added): ‘The idea that countries behave rather like brands is by now fairly familiar to most marketers, and to many economists and politicians . . . [it] is now gaining broader acceptance, and its value . . . is pretty well understood . . . International marketers, too, are at last beginning to understand just how much equity can be added to their brands through the judicious leveraging of their . . . country of origin.’
In other words, both familiarity and acceptance are at relatively low levels, particularly among non-marketers. What is ‘un
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