Country of origin and stereotypes’ influence on the brand evaluation of a product
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1 Introduction
1.1 Definition of the Problem
During the last years to define the concept of COO has become difficult due to the
increased globalization of economy. In fact, the increase of international trade and of
the competition between countries led multinational enterprises to redefine their
production and supply strategies towards a fragmentation of the production phases in
many different countries. Accordingly, it is more and more difficult for consumers to
identify the exact origin of many products. This phenomenon has given rise to the
so-called hybrid products, i.e. goods coming from two or more countries that may
not include the country where the company headquarters are located. Consequently,
COO has been split up in many different taxonomies such as country of design
(COD), country of parts (COP) and country of assembly (COA), country of brand
(COB) and country of manufacture (COM) (Pharr, 2005). In this study research I
will consider Country of brand (COB) because I am interested in testing persons’
knowledge and familiarity with the country from which a brand comes. This is
because such concept is strongly related with the image of a country, a very
important topic for my thesis.
The Country of origin (COO) effect concept, as a variable able to influence
consumer’s decisional processes while purchasing a product has been arousing
strong interest since the ‘70s. Specifically, COO influence on the perception and
evaluation of a brand has been one of the most widely studied phenomena in the
literature of international negotiation, marketing and consumer behaviour during the
last three decades (Martin, Lee, & Lacey, 2011). Until some years ago, in most COO
researches, this phenomenon was assumed as a conscious and controlled cognitive
process. In such procedure, consumers are likely to consider any COO cues as
relevant information and, accordingly, employ such information to make the
evaluation of a product (Liu & Johnson, 2005). Indeed, as Herz and Diamantopoulos
(2013) argued, consumers were usually conceived as cognitive and rational decision
makers. However, recent researches (Liu & Johnson 2005; Martin et al. 2011) have
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proved that COO can be considered as an automatic and unconscious process too
and, consequently, consumers cannot actually be certain about the country
correlations they make (Herz & Diamantopoulos, 2013). In this context, the variety
of activated country stereotypes can considerably affect and produce different brand
evaluations of a product. Such stereotypes depend on the consumers’ culture,
specifically on the individualistic and collectivist dimension. Indeed, on one hand,
individualistic cultures tend to involve cognitive cues, whereas, on the other hand,
collectivist cultures are more likely to provide emotional cues. Moreover, through
the “framing concept” it is possible to understand the link between country
stereotypes and emotions. This is necessary in order to understand also the COO
effect on the brand evaluation of a product. Therefore, it has been my intention to
analyse the main determinants of such effect with the purpose of understanding the
power of COO influence together with country stereotypes’ one.
1.2 Goals of the Report
As it was already anticipated above, the purpose of this Master Thesis has been to
analyse and test the impact of emotional and functional country stereotypes on
consumer’s brand evaluations and classifications of a product.
First of all, after having provided the definition of the most important
concepts such as culture, stereotypes and COO, I focused on the different impact of
COO cues from a country with functional country stereotypes and COO cues from a
country with emotional country stereotypes.
Secondly, I took into consideration the factors influencing both the COO and
Brand CO effects of possible brand misclassifications or non-classifications
highlighting the relative advantages and disadvantages. Accordingly, I developed
some hypotheses to prove the statements’ validity.
As far as the methodology is concerned, the required information for the
empirical section have been collected through a quantitative research analysis by
means of a self-administered online questionnaire that was spread to both social
media pages and personal contacts.
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With regard to the research question, as it was already mentioned, since the
study of country stereotypes presents several theories about brand evaluations
activation, according to Herz and Diamantopoulos (2013), it would be interesting to
analyse how such evaluations can differ according to the type of activated country
stereotype. Indeed, as it cannot be sure whether a certain country stereotype (e.g.,
cognitive for Austria and affective for Portugal) can be applied independently of the
product category involved, Herz and Diamantopoulos (2013) stated that future
research should be conducted in order to investigate how country stereotype
influence can differ between national cultures, especially between individualist and
collectivist ones. This is because the extent to which people are integrated into
groups could influence the extent to which they share the same or analogous country
stereotypes. Therefore, as the authors already investigated the effects among some
countries such as Italy, Brazil, Austria, and Switzerland, they maintained that it
would be interesting to analyse other national cultures such as Spanish on one hand
(collectivist) and German on the other hand (individualist). Accordingly, the main
research question to be answered by this study is:
• RQ1: Do functional and emotional country stereotypes have the same
impact on consumers’ brand evaluation and classification of a product?
1.3 Overview of the Structure and Contents of the Report
In order to accomplish the goal of this research, this report has been divided into two
major sections, a theoretical background research and an empirical part. The first part
has been done during the first semester at the University of Kassel and it provides for
the first four chapters while the second part has been completed at the University of
Léon and it entails the last two chapters.
After having introduced the context, background, relevance and purpose of
the topic in chapter one, it has been outlined the theoretical framework subdivided
into two different chapters. Chapter two has been firstly dedicated to define the basic
topics, starting from culture and stereotypes with all their related concepts. Then, it
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has been provided the definition and scope of COO effect.
In chapter three it has been outlined the COO effect. Specifically, it has been
explained how COO can be activated and how can influence consumer’s brand
evaluations. Then, the main factors influencing COO, such as consumer’s
characteristics, ethnocentrism and animosity have been described. In addition,
special attention has been dedicated to the cognitive, affective and normative
mechanisms for COO effects and the importance of Country image (CI) and Brand
CO recognition in consumer’s perception.
Chapter four has been dedicated to the methodology. In this section, the
conduction of the research has been explained, with a special focus on the
instruments used.
In chapter five it has been discussed the empirical findings and the results. In
this part, special attention has been given to the research hypotheses and purposes.
Then, after having analyzed the obtained data through statistical methods, a detailed
discussion on the attained results has been provided.
In chapter six conclusions have been drawn according to the results obtained
and some implications and limitations have been described in addition to possible
future research proposals resulting from the limitations and problems emerged during
the conduction of the empirical part.
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2 Literature review: Definitions
2.1 Definition of culture
As I already stated above, in this study it has been my intention to investigate the
Country of origin effect and the power of stereotypes on consumer’s brand
evaluations and classifications. Therefore, I took as a reference the previous
theories and models adopted by the authors dealing with such subjects and their
related concepts too, such as the relation between Country stereotypes, COO,
CI, and Brand CO recognition.
The concept of culture has been studied and interpreted by many researchers
in different countries and disciplines since a long time ago. According to Taras,
Rowney and Steel (2009), the first attempts to define culture were initially
performed qualitatively, thus the results were obtained through observation and
focused on aspects such as traditions, artifacts and the language of communities. A
classic definition in the anthropology field was provided by the renowned
researcher Tylor (1903), who considered culture as a whole complex which
includes the knowledge, beliefs, art, morality, law, habits and other competences
attained by individuals as society members. According to Green, Deschamps and
Paez (2005) anthropology considers culture as an existing knowledge, that is the
accumulation of information over time and socially shared knowledge, and
conceived as a set of existing basic conceptual structures, from which a shared
representation of the world is built. Such structures emerge from daily interactions
between people and the environment, and are guided by social institutions such as
schools, media, military forces etc. Similarly, Green et al., (2005) estimated that the
contributions of psychology to the notion of culture primarily established three
meanings:
1. Culture has been used to describe a group of people who stay together
because of the value of some shared characteristics;
2. Culture is the organizer of persons’ psychological systems, i.e., culture
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belongs to each individual;
3. Culture is the way an individual and the environment are related.
With regard to quantitative researches, they appeared as a response to the
need to link it to different contexts such as: anthropology, archeology and
psychology, and contemplate in other different areas of engineering, management
and education. In summary, research in quantifying culture focus attention on
cultural values that are defined as basic features of groups that have strong
influence on the behavior of its members. According to Taras et al., (2009),
although there have been some attempts to quantify culture globally, the research
projects conducted by Hofstede (Hofstede, 1980), Schwartz (Schwartz, 1999), and,
only recently, GLOBE (House et al., 2004), aroused a widespread interest in
measuring culture and, consequently, they became an undiscussed reference for
further studies and investigations.
Culture can be seen represented in both cultural customs and cultural values.
The former offer a predominantly qualitative description associated with rituals,
symbols, artistic expressions and languages; while, the latter, provide support for
quantitative research and presumably have more influence on human behavior
(Taras et al., 2009). Such values are conceived as the basic precepts shared by
people belonging to the same culture.
There is another very important cultural concept called “cultural
dimensions”: they are the foundations on which cultural studies are developed.
According to Green et al., (2005) there is one concern about the determination of
how many dimensions and, specifically, which ones permit to interpret the culture
of a social group. Despite the high number of investigations conducted so far,
there are still difficulties in perceiving culture and uncertainty in the employed
quantification tools.
In the next section I will provide an overview of the most renowned authors
and the models that have been developed to characterize culture.