Research On Integrated Marketing Communications Of Country Image Based On The Dual Attitudes Model

As a component of a country’s soft power, the country image concerns a country’s international standing and influence and is a critical factor influencing its international relationship and its pursuit for healthy and sustainable development. A good country image is an intangible asset of great importance for a country and it not only can enhance the confidence and sense of cohesion of its people, improve the capability of its government of handling domestic and international affairs, but also is beneficial for seeking international sympathy and support, as well as for wining recognition of other countries in the world and improving the international influence.With the rapid and sustainable development of its economy, the overall strength of China becomes increasingly apparent and it plays a more and more important role internationally, but its country image for participation in international communications has been disputing and the discourse power for China’s country image has been controlled by the western countries for a long time. In recent years, Chinese government has been paying more and more attention to the country image and various activities of international communication have been carried out successively. It is a historical progress. However, for China it is a totally new practice to build its country image, so both the concept and the activities of communication can be improved and enhanced considerably.The building of country image is the result of input and output of a series of information and a complicated process of communication involving various information sources. Currently the studies about communication of country images in China mainly concentrate on the field of Communication and certain rich and valuable research results have be developed. But scholars often focus on theoretical deduction and strategy analysis when studying on the information communication of country images, or focus on individual typical means of information communication, such as mass media, relevant documents that comprehensively analyze the information contact during the building process of target country images are very rare. In other countries, the country image has received a great attention as a critical part of country marketing for a long period of time. In 1960s, the research on country country-of-origineffects proved that the country image had a direct influence on the consumer behavior and corporate marketing performance. In 2003 The Marketing of Nations by Philip Kotler was published, raising the concept of "a nation can be run as a company, and it can be guided by the theory of strategic marketing management to create economic wealth".Attitude is the core concept in social psychology, and it has a wide range of applications in the field of management and marketing. This paper, taking South Korea as the case,from the perspective of marketing, tries to apply the dual attitude model--the new development in the field of attitude research, to the research of country images and demonstrate the duality of country images with the method of empirical approach, of which the implicit country image with characteristic of unconsciousness and automation separates from the explicit country image and is more difficult to be changed. Under this premise, an empirical study will be carried out on the explicit and implicit country image with the two dimensions of marketing communication—the information source and media of communication, to further explore the integrated marketing mechanism of the explicit and implicit country image and to put forward some enlightenment for the integrated marketing communication of China image.In order to realize above-mentioned research, this paper organizes its contents as follows.Firstly, a systematic examination on the domestic and international theoretical research on country image, dual attitude model and integrated marketing communication will be carried out to provide theoretical support for following theoretical analysis and empirical research by analyzing the status quo, trends and deficiency in the field of country image marketing communication.Then, it is the empirical research on the duality of country image. In this part, a hypothesis will be raised in accordance with the theory of dual attitude model and then the measurement of implicit and explicit country image and the empirical research on them will be designed, and a research result will be concluded after the statistics and analysis of SC-IAT data.Thirdly, in the framework of duality of country image, the concept model of target audience for perceiving country image will be set up from the consumer oriented core concept of integrated marketing communication to explore the process of how the target audience perceive and form their images of other countries based on the experience and knowledge of their contact points with different country images. Then the detail information sources and medias during the process of target audience for perceiving country images will be analyzed and the research hypothesis for integrated marketing communication under the duality of country image will be brought out.Fourthly, the method of regression analysis will be used to examine the influence of information sources and medias on explicit and implicit country images, and further digging the inner mechanism of duality, i.e. the factors of marketing communication that influence the explicit image and implicit image are different too and with their own peculiarity.Finally, a brief summary will be made about the above-mentioned theoretical analysis and empirical research to put forward some enlightenment for the integrated marketing communication of China image. Then sum up the innovations and deficiencies of this research and provide references for following researches.This paper selects South Korea (the neighbor of China) as the research object, uses the combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis, and applies SC-IAT, questionnaire and regression analysis to examine the research hypothesis. The main innovations of the research are as follows.Firstly, the research on the communication of country images is from a perspective of marketing. Currently the studies about communication of country images in China mainly concentrate on the field of Communication, while researchs on country images from perspective of marketing mainly are carried on revolving around the country-of-origin effects and the studies about image communication in this field are rare. This paper researches on the perception of target audience for country image based on attitude theory. It not only sets up sufficient and solid theoretical basis for the country image communication, but also is an innovational development in the field of country image research by trying to use the new development in attitude theory-dual attitude model in the research of country image. And it also provides a new angle for research on the formation and communication of country images by changing the perspective from customer-oriented to focusing on interaction and audience segmentation.Secondly, demonstrating the duality of country image. The previous domestic and international researches of country image based on attitude tend to define and measure from cognitive image and emotional image and focus mainly on the explicit results of information processing. This paper uses the empirical method of SC-IAT to demonstrate there is also separation of implicit an explicit country image for the target audience’s perception of country image and the implicit country image with characteristic of unconsciousness and automation is more difficult to be changed. The theory provides theoretical references for understanding the misunderstanding of country image communication and setting up the effective route for transcultural communication of country images and also is a worthy try for using dual attitude model in the field of country image research.Thirdly, exploring the mechanism of integrated marketing communication in the framework of country image duality. The structural research of country image using dual attitude model shows there is implicit structure and explicit structure for country image, that is the duality of country image. This paper, based on the perspective of integrated marketing communication, focuses mainly on setting up the concept model for the formation of country image from the two dimensions of information sources and medias for target audience as the theoretical framework for empirical research on integrated marketing communication under the duality of country image. And then, based on the model of information source and information media for the formation of country image, regression analysis is carried out on the implicit and explicit image respectively to explore the marketing communication factors influencing the dual country image and further dig the inner mechanism of duality, i.e. the factors of marketing communication that influence the explicit image and implicit image are different too and with their own peculiarity.