Reducing The Country-of-origin Effects Under Multiple Cues Mode

Previous research on country-of-origin effects has examined the composition ofproduct-country images, and how consumers use country of origin as a cue fordetermining product quality. While considerable research in marketing has showedthat country of origin has a great impact on product evaluations and sometimes itwould bias consumer’ product beliefs, less work has focused on how products,especially for those coming from countries with a perceived weaker quality, cancounteract these effects. Our study addresses this issue and provides managers with aproactive, tangible way of reducing the COO effects. According to cues utilizationtheory, negative country of origin effect can be reduced by replacing product countryimage cue with instrinsic cues or by weakening the weight of product country imagecue with other extrinsic cues. Two basic theories are used in this study: metacognitivetheory and joint-separate mode theory.COO can be viewed as a stereotype, which consumers use as a shortcut whenevaluating products. Theories about stereotype argue that humans appear to reasonusing two processing styles: heuristic system that is quick, intuitive and effortless andanalytic process that is slow, analytical, and deliberate that occasionally correct theoutput of automatic process. Researches suggest that automatic process results instereotypic thoughts being more accessible in memory. Thus the activation of theanalytic process is a possible way to reduce COO effects. Yet to date, how to activatethe analytic process to counter the COO effects has been neglected in marketing. Wepropose that some kinds of presentation of products information, which causeinformation disfluency, can activate the analytic process to reduce the COO effectsthrough reducing the intuitive confidence. Note that not all kinds of presentation ofproduct information can reduce the COO effects; even these presentation styles bringa large amount of information disfluency to consumers. As the increase of informationdisfluency, the cognitive loads, which hinder the activation of analytic process, alsoincrease.There is some condition where the analytic process doesn’t work. Then,weakenning the weight of product country image with other extrinsic cues might bean effective to counteract negative country of origin effect. According topsychological theory, jiont-separate modes can reverse individual’s refrence by changing the product attributes weight. We found that, facing to the product countryof origin and the price, cousumer would prefer price to country of origin in the jointevaluative mode, and would prefer country of origin in the separate evaluative mode.When consumer faced to the product country of origin and its brand, he canmanipulate the weight of these attributes by changing their forms.This paper consists of four parts of introduction, Literature Review, experimentsand conclusion. The introduction part includes the1st chapter which mainly clarifyingthe background and significance of this research as well as the research purpose andcontains. Theory development comprises the2nd,3rd,4thand5thcahpter, in which wereview and analyze literature about country of origin, cue utilizaiton theory,metacoginitive theory and joint-separate evaluative modes. Chapter6and7constituesthe first study, which analyses and proves the relevance between the analytic processand negative country of origin. Chapter8and9constitute the second study, whichdiscusses the relationship between the jiont-separate modes and the country of origin.We conclude the results and magnagement and practice meaning. We also point outthe limit in our research and make some suggestions to the future research.