The Research Of Brand Country-of-Origin Stereotypes

Brand's country-of-origin is a research focus in the international marketing fields. Previous researches focus on the influence of country-of-origin on consumer purchase decision, but they could not reveal the process of the influence.The cognitive mechanism of brand's country-of-origin stereotype can reveal the influence of country-of-origin on consumer decision-making process. And it can help find psychological and physiological mechanism of brand's country-of-origin, explain the root causes of country-of-origin consumer stereotypes.With the rising of China's labor and raw materials costs, transformation and upgrading of Chinese enterprises is imperative, the construction of international brand becomes the inevitable requirement. If consumers have negative stereotypes on Chinese brands will be a serious impediment to the construction of international brands. For example, Quality and safety incidents had seriously affected consumer's brand image of domestic milk in the past few years.With the rising of Chinese great spending power, Chinese market has been a key area for the domestic and foreign enterprises. In consequence, the research, which will reveal the kind of stereotypes of consumers on Chinese brand and the cognitive mechanism of brand's country-of-origin stereotype, will help enterprises to take the right way to face this kind of stereotype, and take proper countermeasures to apply or reverse stereotypes.For the first, we summarized the research achievements of stereotypes and country of origin, including the researches of scale and the event related brain potentials method.In order to understand the cognitive mechanism of the implicit country-of-origin stereotype, we selected a more objective method of event related potential. Event related potential system has the characteristics of high time resolution, can reveal the process of country-of-origin stereotypes in accordance with the time.A3 (brand's country-of-origin:Chinese Brand, Foreign Brand, Mask)x2 (adjective:negative vs. positive) mixed factorial design was implemented in this study. In the experiment,18 participants were required to classify the adjective in stimulus 2 as being either negative or positive during a S1-S2 paradigm, while the reaction time was recorded. The participants'data was analyzed with a 3×2 within-subjects analysis of variance (ANOVA) and t-test.The results of the experiments indicated the following:(1) Versus Mask, the stimulus contained brand names facilitates the consumer decision-making process. It's similar to brand identify. Brand name may activate the stereotype and improve the efficiency of subjects dealing with the adjective. (2) Compared with the foreign brand, consumers had more negative implicit impression on domestic brand.We provided the basic and objective evidence for the cognitive mechanism of the implicit country-of-origin stereotype, and fill in brain processing in the cognitive stage of brand's country-of-origin stereotypes.On behavior data, when consumers praise a negative country-of-origin stereotype will produce conflict and lead to a longer reaction time, while praising the brand with positive country-of-origin stereotypes does not exist the conflict; On the ERP components, praising the brand with negative country-of-origin stereotypes will cause larger N400 amplitudes.Finally, based on the experimental data and conclusion, we put forward the corresponding suggestion for the enterprise to apply or reverse brand country-of-origin stereotypes and construct international brands.