Wong, Chui Yim (2005) The impact of foreign versus local aspects of country-of-origin on Chinese consumers' evaluation of home and foreign products. Research Master thesis, Victoria University.

Abstract

As globalisation of the world's economies proceeds at a rapid pace, an area of continuous interest in international marketing is the influence of the country of origin (COO) effect on prospective purchasers of products. Although the effects of COO has been an active research area for many years, increased globalisation has resulted in a shifting of focus from a single country "made-in" concept to other aspects such as a product's design or parts locations. The components of Country-of-design (COD), Country-of-manufacture/assembly (COA) and Country-of-parts/components (COP) are meaningful because many firms increasingly outsource the product's design, assembly, and parts to different countries. However, the extent of influence of these factors is not fully understood, and it is not known whether they are applicable across all markets. The present study provides a deeper understanding of the influence of COO by examining the effects of COD, COA , and COP together with their interaction on perceptions of product quality and consumer purchase intentions in the context of home country versus foreign ones. Our study measures the effects of these components, namely, COD, COA, and COP, on consumer product evaluation and purchase intentions based on two high involvement products of automobile and digital camera using MANOVA techniques. We observe that there is no support for a direct effect of the three COO sub-components on consumer product assessment and purchase intention in the context of the China market for either product. These findings suggest that, although the effect of the various sub-components of COO on consumer evaluation of product or purchase intent may well have been significant in the past, their continuing significance is questionable in the current global market place in which hybrid products have gradually become the norm. In addition, we also examine the factors which may have a moderating effect on the three COO sub-components in the context of local and foreign sources. The results suggest that ethnocentrism and country capability plays a limited role in mediating the effects of COD, COA, and COP on product evaluation and purchase intentions. The results of this study will be of interest to COO researchers and to corporations involved in global marketing and production. In particular, our findings imply that firms may not benefit from providing consumers with detailed global sourcing information such as COD, COA and COP on the product label, nor do they need to be overly concerned with the choice of production locations by limiting them to countries with a favourable image.

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