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The paper empirically examines the influence of brand names (foreign versus national) on consumer perception. The paper also investigates how product ratings affect the relationship between brand names and consumer perception which is measured by brand attitude, purchase intention, advertisement feeling, and advertisement attitude. The results show that the national brand elicits more positive consumer perception than the foreign brand. The findings suggest that product attribute information moderates the relationship between brand names and consumer perception. The results are important and relevant to branding strategies marketers use to counteract competitive brands.
Globalization and free trade agreements have drastically increased the variety of options consumers must consider when buying a product. This plethora of options can cause consumers some consternation. Namely, how does one evaluate a product offering? Consumers rely on several strategies to determine their choices: go with the country of origin (COO), go with the brand, or go with the product attribute he or she most prizes in the product.
Information on COO can affect product evaluations and purchase decisions. Consumers are more interested in whether a particular brand is manufactured by foreign-owned or domestically-owned companies (Haubl, 1996; Papadopoulos & Heslop, 1993). An extensive stream of literature has developed over the past few decades not only to address the influence of COO labels on consumer perception, but also to test factors other than the COO information which can potentially affect consumer evaluation (Al- Sulaiti & Baker, 1998; Samiee, 1994). The COO literature has examined a large number of factors in conjunction with the COO information in a number of frameworks. For example, Sharma et al. (1995) develop a model testing antecedents and moderators of consumer ethnocentrism. Whereas researchers have explored the effects of brand names on consumer perceptions, they have yet to investigate whether product attributes such as product ratings may moderate the effect of a brand name on consumer perception.
This study examines how brand names that reflect COO affect consumer evaluation. Secondly this study investigates how brand names that reflect COO interact with product ratings and what influence they might have on consumer attitude toward the brand, purchase intentions, advertisement feeling, and attitude toward the advertisement. The study relies on sport shoes as a focal product. The study is implemented to...