Research On The Impact Of Country-of-Origin Dimensions On Consumer Behavior

Globalization has dominated the development of the world's economics since 1990's. As multinational companies continue to pursue global market expansion strategies, outsourcing of various aspects in the production process has shown a marked increase. These activities have contributed to greater complexities in country-of-origin (COO) effect, which arise the attentions of the researchers home and aboard in the field of intemational marketing.This research examined the multidimensional constructs of the country concept, specifically, country-of-brand (B), country-of-parts (P) and country-of-assembly (A), which took the notebook PC as the product category and the student sample was employed. It used 2*2*2 between-subjects design, which allowed the each respondent to be randomly assigned in 8 groups. Two levels each were specified for brand, parts and assembly locations: the United States and China. The purpose of this research was to find out the evidence of country-of-origin effect among the Chinese customers as well as to establish a conceptual framework that dealt with the relationship between the multidimensional constructs of country-of-origin to consumer evaluations, attitudes and buying intentions. Apart from these, the effect of product knowledge and demographic variables were also studied.The paper first outlined the research background and purpose as well as the methodology used. The next part reviewed the COO literature and some of the contributions to this stream of research. A conceptual framework based on hypotheses generated was presented, which was followed by a description of research design, including the choice of product category, sample and the proper scales. The empirical results and managerial implications were delineated after the data analysis conducted by the SPSS statistic software. Lastly, the limitation and further studies were specified.The results revealed that the country-of-parts main effect on the product quality perception was significant, and the two-way interaction of country-of-brand and country-of-parts, country-of-brand and country-of-assembly were significant. It also showed that three multidimensional of country-of-origin has no impact on the perceived design quality. The country-of-parts main effect on product attitude was significant, while country-of-brand and country-of-assembly were not. A significant B*P*A three-way interaction was existed as well. Respondents with different subjective product knowledge were expected to perform differently. It was confirmed by the fact that people with low product knowledge gave better evaluations than those who processed high knowledge. For those with low product knowledge, both the design quality and product attitude directly affected buying intention while only product attitude worked among the people with high knowledge.