Disentangling country-of-origin effects: the interplay of product ethnicity, national identity, and consumer ethnocentri
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Disentangling country-of-origin effects: the interplay of product ethnicity, national identity, and consumer ethnocentrism Peter M. Fischer 1 & Katharina P. Zeugner-Roth 2
# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016
Abstract The country-of-origin (COO) of products has been shown to affect consumer choice, especially in situations where the origin has a stereotypical association with particular products and depending on certain consumer traits (e.g., national identity, consumer ethnocentrism). However, little is known about how these phenomena are related. Two controlled experiments conducted in two different countries and product categories reveal that product ethnicity moderates the impact of national identity but not of consumer ethnocentrism. National identity is found to influence consumer preference only if the foreign product ethnicity is higher but not lower than that of comparable domestic products. Furthermore, while consumers with a low national identity are positively affected by a high product ethnicity of foreign products, this effect vanishes with increasing levels of national identity. This research has implications for academics and practitioners alike, as it examines important boundary conditions of country-oforigin effects that have been undiscovered so far. Keywords National identity . Consumer ethnocentrism . Product ethnicity . Country-of-origin . Controlled experiment . Spotlight and floodlight analysis The growth of global trade and the evolution of global consumer segments have increased awareness of and interest in the effects of country-of-origin (COO) labels on consumer evaluations. In general, literature distinguishes among three distinct
* Peter M. Fischer [email protected] Katharina P. Zeugner-Roth [email protected]
1
Institute of Marketing, University of St. Gallen, Dufourstrasse 40a, 9000 St. Gallen, Switzerland
2
IESEG School of Management (LEM-CNRS), Université Catholique de Lille, 3 Rue de la Digue, 59000 Lille, France
Mark Lett
processes through which COO affects evaluations and purchase intentions (Obermiller and Spangenberg 1989; Verlegh and Steenkamp 1999; Zeugner-Roth and Zabkar 2015). First, COO influences consumer behavior through the country image (Roth and Diamantopoulos 2009; Usunier and Cestre 2007), which pertains to the effect of information about a product’s origin on consumers’ expected product outcomes. Depending on the particular country image and/or stereotypes at hand, a country could be seen as a more or less favorable origin for certain products (e.g., France and Germany for wine versus beer), i.e., have a higher versus lower product ethnicity (Tseng and Balabanis 2011; Usunier and Cestre 2007). This process is cognitive in nature and the most frequently studied in extant COO research (Roth and Diamantopoulos 2009). Second, in line with common attitude models (Fishbein and Ajzen 1975), a consumer can be favorable toward a product from a foreign country (i.e., have a positive attitude toward it) but still decide not to buy it due to nor
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