Empirical Study Of The Impact Of Brand Image Of The Country Of Origin And Functional Properties Of The Mobile Phone Brand Attitude

With the continued and rapid growth of Chinese economy in last few years, the famous companies of the world have paid more attention to the development of the Chinese market .For this reason, it becomes very important to investigate the Chinese consumer's psychology and behavior.There have been many studies which found that consumers often evaluate product quality according to the country of origin information. However, existing studies on Chinese country image are few to see, and the definitions of country image are in confusion. They mainly have emphasized the country image related to the functional factors of a product in consumer purchasing decisions,but have paid rather little attention to the country image itself. At present, there are more and more Hybrid Products, and it is too difficult for consumer to differentiate the product's "country of manufacturing", "country of Designing", "Country of Assembling" and so on. Meanwhile, the influence of brand becomes more and more powerful. In the situation, according to the previous international research results, consumers would choose country-of-origin of brand as the important decision clues. For the reasons mentioned above, from the view angle of country-of-origin of brand, this paper will investigate how country image and functional attributes influence Chinese consumer's brand attitude. Further, according to the previous domestic research that have proved the presence of Consumer Ethnocentrism in the Chinese market, this thesis will choose Consumer Ethnocentrism as an adjusting variable which may adjust the impacts of the country image to brand attitude and the functional attributes to brand attitude.Based on the research on mobile telephone, the results are showed as follows:(1)The country-of-origin image and functional attributes do influence Chinese consumers' brand attitudes, the higher opinion of the country that people have, the better consumers' attitudes to the brands from the country.(2)Functional attributes have a greater impact on consumers' brand attitudes than country-of-origin image.(3)The Consumer Ethnocentrism adjusts the influence of the country-of-origin image to Chinese consumers' brand attitudes. It strengthens the impact for domestic brands, and weaken the impact for foreign brands.(4) The Consumer Ethnocentrism adjusts the influence of functional attributes to Chinese consumers' brand attitudes to the brands from Japan ,Corea and China. It strengthens the impact for Chinese brands, and weakens the impact for brands from Japan and Corea. The Consumer Ethnocentrism have no interferential effect for American brands.Finally, the study has proposed marketing strategies in reply to the Country-of-Origin Effect for Chinese corporation.