A Study On The Country-of-Origin Effect And Its Determinants

The country-of-origin effect has been studied for a long time by the international communication academics. The past relevant studies not only testified the existence of the country-of-origin effect, but also explored the determinants and mechanisms which caused the country-of-origin effect. However, there are still some relevant problems need to be settled. For instance, to some extent, Chinese market has been ignored by scholars for a long time, whereas China occupies important positions in the global industry chains. China needs more attention. Furthermore, since July 2007, "Made in China" has suffered a lot from a series of "Crisis of Confidence", which makes the researches of the country-of-origin effect on the foreign consumers in Chinese market more urgent, especially those focus on the consumers from developing countries. So this paper tries to provide answers to the arising questions, such as, "How do the foreign consumers think about 'Made in China' ", "How does the country image of China influence the building of Chinese brands", "How to improve the foreign marketing of Chinese brands", and so on.The research, adopting the experimentation, took 51 foreign consumers who are from developing countries and also living in Xiamen as the subjects, and tested four factors that may influence consumers' evaluations of products: the country of origin, the technology content of a product, the industry advantage of a country and the type of country-of-origin. The research drew the following conclusions: First, the country-of-origin effect exists universally in the foreign consumers from developing countries. The two factors, technology content of a product and the industry advantage of a country, both influence the country-of-origin effect, while the type of country-of-origin almost has no impact on the country-of-origin effect. Second, despite the different levels of products' technology content, there are still some correlations between the industry advantage of a country and the consumers' evaluations of products. In another words, generally speaking, the stronger the industry advantage of a country is, the higher the evaluation of a product from the consumers, and vice verse. For China, the traditional industries, such as Chinese herbal medicine and tea drink, still have the advantages over the counterparts from America and Japan. But in the low-tech or the middle-tech industries, the overall strength of Chinese products is still lower than its counterpart from America. Third, the country-of-origin itself has a very big impact on the consumers' evaluations of products. Its influence is even bigger than the influence of the technology content of a product. In a word, the research results support the flexible model brought forward by Knight& Calantone (2000). The model holds the points that both the image of country-of-origin and the product belief formed by consumers' knowledge and experience, to some extent, influence consumers' quality evaluations of products and their brand attitudes directly.At the end, the paper analyzed and discussed the causes that led to the research results, and offered suggestions on foreign marketing strategy for the developing countries markets according to those results.