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Introduction
Consumers care about the origin of the products they buy (Thøgersen et al., 2017) and their perception of a country influences their evaluation of products from the country in question (Josiassen et al., 2013). This is well-documented. Especially, it is often found that consumers use the country of origin (COO) as a cue to product quality (Dekhili et al., 2011). Consumers’ perception of a country – the country’s image (Roth and Diamantopoulos, 2009) – depends on a range of factors, including familiarity with the country (Lee et al., 2016), geographical distance (Kim et al., 2018; Pedersen et al., 2018), cultural distance (Magnusson et al., 2008), interest in the country (Yeh et al., 2010) and economic development (Nuttavuthisit and Thøgersen, 2019). Also, consumers may feel animosity towards a country because of historical conflicts or current political events (Harmeling et al., 2015). To complicate matters further, consumers may hold – partly redundant – representations of a country’s image at different levels of abstraction, from the country in general to a specific product or product category from the country (e.g. Columbian coffee, German cars and French wine) (Roth and Diamantopoulos, 2009). Josiassen et al. (2013) suggested a hierarchical, three-level model of country image that distinguishes between and integrates country images at different abstraction levels, which has helped structuring and integrating this somewhat fragmented research field. However, it still remains to be documented that this model is valid across countries and in relation to global trade where import and export countries greatly differ in knowledge and familiarity.
As pointed out by Josiassen et al. (2013), consumers in principle can have many images for product categories from a given county. This raises the question of the appropriate specification of the product category when measuring a category-country image (CCI) (e.g. cars vs electric cars, food vs organic food, etc.). In line with the well-documented “correspondence principle” in attitude research (Ajzen and Fishbein, 1977), it has been suggested that the CCI should be specified to the product when the aim is to assess the impact of country image on product evaluations (Roth and Diamantopoulos, 2009). However, we know of no studies that test whether a conceptualization of CCI that corresponds more...