Country of Origin Effect

Effects of Individual and Product-specific Variables on Utilising Country of Origin as a Product Quality Cue by Effects of Individual and Product-specific Variables
27
Received November 1987 Revised March 1988

Sevgin A. Eroglu
Georgia State University, and

Karen A. Machleit
University of Cincinnati To date, considerable research effort has been made to determine whether country of origin affects consumers ' product evaluations. Previous studies in industrial (for example White, 1977; White and Cundiff, 1978) and consumer buying (see for example, Andersen and Cunningham, 1972; Lillis and Narayana, 1974; Gaedeke, 1973; Han and Terpstra, 1988) have shown the country of origin to be a salient cue in buyers ' evaluations of product quality. However, due to other conflicting findings, some questions have been raised about the theory and methodology of the research (Bilkey and Nes, 1982; Jaffe and Nebenzahl, 1984) as well as whether the country of origin effect even exists (Johansson et al.; Schellinck, 1986). The conflicting findings in the literature have been attributed, in part, to the methodological limitations of past studies (Bilkey and Nes, 1982). One of the major limitations Bilkey and Nes point out about this research stream concerns the number of product cues considered. Most studies used a single cue, country of origin, as the only information on which respondents based their evaluations. This not only created internal and external validity problems, but also prohibited the assessment of how much influence the country of origin cue has in the presence of other product cues. Second, the authors contend that respondents were typically asked to base their product evaluations on only verbal references to products. The use of an actual, as opposed to an imaginary product, might have produced completely different results. A third major limitation concerns the general lack of attention to reliability and validity issues. The inadequate or non-existent

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