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Disentangling country-of-origin effects: the interplay of product ethnicity, national identity, and consumer ethnocentrism

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Abstract

The country-of-origin (COO) of products has been shown to affect consumer choice, especially in situations where the origin has a stereotypical association with particular products and depending on certain consumer traits (e.g., national identity, consumer ethnocentrism). However, little is known about how these phenomena are related. Two controlled experiments conducted in two different countries and product categories reveal that product ethnicity moderates the impact of national identity but not of consumer ethnocentrism. National identity is found to influence consumer preference only if the foreign product ethnicity is higher but not lower than that of comparable domestic products. Furthermore, while consumers with a low national identity are positively affected by a high product ethnicity of foreign products, this effect vanishes with increasing levels of national identity. This research has implications for academics and practitioners alike, as it examines important boundary conditions of country-of-origin effects that have been undiscovered so far.

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Notes

  1. Usunier and Cestre (2007) took the percentage of overall nominations, then calculated its squared percentage and deducted the sum of all other squared percentages from this squared percentage before dividing this number by the sum of all squared percentages and eventually building its squared root. The standardized product ethnicity scores reveal then the product ethnicity of a country from 0 (no product ethnicity) to 1 (high product ethnicity). Since this formula was originally developed to show whether a country has a high product ethnicity, but fails to deliver medium and low ethnicity scores, we slightly modified the original formula. Specifically, we established a weighted count that considered the rank of a country. For example, we added the number of times a country was mentioned first and multiplied it by four. When it was mentioned only second, we multiplied it by three, and so forth. We then divided this weighted count by the weighted count of the first choices. This procedure essentially led to similar results as the formula by Usunier and Cestre (2007) (i.e., countries with a high product ethnicity were still the highest), but additionally also yielded ethnicity scores for less optimal product-country and country-product associations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Marketing, University of St. Gallen, Dufourstrasse 40a, 9000, St. Gallen, Switzerland

    Peter M. Fischer

  2. IESEG School of Management (LEM-CNRS), Université Catholique de Lille, 3 Rue de la Digue, 59000, Lille, France

    Katharina P. Zeugner-Roth

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  1. Peter M. Fischer
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Correspondence to Peter M. Fischer.

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Fischer, P.M., Zeugner-Roth, K.P. Disentangling country-of-origin effects: the interplay of product ethnicity, national identity, and consumer ethnocentrism. Mark Lett 28, 189–204 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-016-9400-7

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