Abstract
Literature and research studies on country of origin (COO) have mainly focused on its effect in business to consumer (B2C) markets. Among the few scholars who have analysed industrial sectors (B2B), some believe that COO has similar importance and the same function in B2B markets as in B2C markets. In contrast, others argue that industrial customers are less influenced by this phenomenon. To contribute to this debate, we selected a group of Italian companies in different industries operating in at least one foreign market. We administered electronic questionnaires, collecting data and information on the internationalization of these enterprises, the COO effect and its relevance, namely, the elements that most influence the COO effect. The data also enabled us to examine the importance of company and brand reputation in the internationalization of B2B industries.
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Notes
- 1.
The companies were selected from the member lists of the following associations: (Food) Federalimentare—Federation of the Italian food industry, UnionAlimentari—National Union of small and medium food companies; (Furniture-Wood) FederLegnoArredo—Federation of furniture and furnishing companies; (Chemical) Federchimica—National Federation of the chemical industry; (Electronic) ANIE—National Federation of electrotechnical and electronics companies; (Mechanical) Federmeccanica—Italian Federation of metalworking industries, AMMA—Association of mechanical and mechatronic companies; (Plastic) Federazione Gomma e Plastica—Rubber and Plastics Federation, Polimerica—Italian Institute of packaging; (Textile-clothing) ASSOMAC—National Association of Italian manufacturers of footwear, leather goods and tannery Machines and accessories, Sistema Moda Italia—textiles and fashion Federation, Uniontessile—National Union of small and medium private industrial companies.
- 2.
The mailings started in December 2013 and the recalls are still in progress.
- 3.
The degree of association was evaluated by calculating the Pearson Ƙ 2 index, the Cramer’s V and Phi normalized index values. The values obtained were subjected to appropriate tests to identify their actual significance.
- 4.
A preliminary analysis was conducted aimed at highlighting the eventual presence of outliers that could adversely affect the construction of groups by the software used (SPSS). The negative outcome of this analysis, suitably tested, allowed using all available information at the same time without excluding company cases that, on the contrary, would have suggested associating specific clusters to those obtained through processing the resulting subset data.
The clustering produced substantially overlapping results, both in the use of a k-means-type algorithm, which subdivides the statistical units (in our case companies) into disjoint subsets such that each cluster is associated with a centroid and each firm is assigned to the cluster whose centroid is nearest, and to one hierarchical type, which instead organizes the units on a tree diagram (dendrogram) constructed on the basis of a matrix of distances between the objects according to a chosen metric (in our case the Euclidean distance). The tests conducted on the complete matrix of information enabled verifying that all the variables included as input to the clustering were significant within the aggregation process.
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Cedrola, E., Battaglia, L., Quaranta, A.G. (2016). Country Reputation, Brand Reputation and Company Reputation: Their Importance in Business-to-Business Industries. In: Petruzzellis, L., Winer, R. (eds) Rediscovering the Essentiality of Marketing. Developments in Marketing Science: Proceedings of the Academy of Marketing Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29877-1_97
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