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Khalid I. Al-Sulaiti: PhD Student, Department of Marketing, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK
Michael J. Baker: Professor of Marketing, Department of Marketing, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: With special appreciation to Dr Nabeel Shams, Bahrain Center for Studies and Research, for his valuable comments.
Introduction
Over the past 30 years or so the growth in international trade and the development of global markets has been accompanied by a significant increase in interest in the nature of competitiveness. Among the many factors which are believed to impact upon international competitiveness, country of origin (COO) effects (sometimes referred to as product country image or PCI) have attracted growing attention.
This literature review covers most of the citation on the subject and is believed to be the most comprehensive and up-to-date currently available. The review opens with some definitions of COO effects and is then organised chronologically and thematically. The period covered is from 1965 to early 1997 and the themes addressed include the evaluation of products, stereotyping, the effects of demographics on consumers' perceptions of imports, perceived risk and country of origin effects and, finally COO effects on service decisions.
Definition
Country of origin effects have been defined in many ways in the literature. According to Wang and Lamb (1983), country of origin effects are intangible barriers to enter new markets in the form of negative consumer bias toward imported products. Johansson et al. (1985) and Ozsomer and Cavusgil (1991) define country of origin as the country where corporate headquarters of the company marketing the product or brand is located. Typically, this is the home country for a company. Country of origin is inherent in certain brands. IBM and Sony, for example, imply US and Japanese origins, respectively (Samiee, 1994). Bilkey and Nes (1982), Cattin et al., (1982), Han and Terpstra (1988), Lee and Schaninger (1996), Papadopoulos (1993) and White (1979), define the product's country of origin as "the country of manufacture or assembly". It refers to the final point of manufacture which can be the same as the headquarters for a company. According to Samiee (1994) "country of manufacturepertains to firms that maintains a relatively large global network of operations or do business with a variety of suppliers, e.g., contract manufacturing" (p. 581). While, Bannister...