The Effects of China’s Country-of-Origin Image on Korean Consumers’ Perceived Value and Purchase Intentions: Comparison between Country-of-Manufacture (COM) and Country-of-Brand (COB)

Abstract

To infer the true state of a regional product's attributes, consumers use the image they have of the product's region of origin; however, products may have multiple countries of origin in their design, branding, sourcing and manufacturing becuase more products are increasingly a result of multi-firm and multi-country efforts. We examined how the country-of-origin image (country image and product image) affect international consumers' perceived value (function value and symbolic value) and purchase intentions of made-in China goods by extending and deepening the flexible model. Second, to investigate the differences of COO effects according to different types of country-of-origin we divided the traditional country-of-origin into two components: country-of-manufacture (COM) and country-of-brand (COB). We then explore how the impact of China's country image on consumers' perceived value and purchase intentions varies when China is the COM or COB of the same product. Six hypotheses were proposed to test our anticipations. We recruited 800 Korean adult consumers who previously purchased made-in China products to participate in the online investigation. Data analyses were conducted with confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling using SPSS and AMOS. The main results are discussed as follows. First, the effects of China's COO image on Korean consumers' perceived value and purchase intentions vary when China is the COM or COB of a product. Second, a positive effect of the function value and symbolic value on the purchase intentions was found. Literature and practical implications of findings are discussed and suggested in the conclusion.

The Effects of China’s Country-of-Origin Image on Uzbekistani Consumers’ Food Purchase Intentions

“…When the situation allowed, we utilized a validated and dependable measurement basis in accordance with the measures of associated concepts in the literature. To test H1 and the other three hypotheses, we referred to previous studies [11,20,38] defining factors of country image and product image, which argue that these variables will affect the buying intention. Respondents were requested to identify to what extent they envision procuring Chinese foods.…”

“…Their responses were to be based only on their personal view of China's COO image, including product, economic, people, and international relationship image. Here, once more, [20] provided the method of measuring the purchase intention as well as the product, economic, people, and international relationship image. Subjects provided their answers on a five-point scale from 1 = "Strongly Disagree" to 5 = "Strongly agree".…”

“…According to [19], China's country image has a positive influence on Korean consumers' purchase intentions-both directly (i.e., culture image) and indirectly (i.e., people, politics, and evolution image)-through their product evaluations when purchasing Chinese clothing, food, electric home appliances, and toys. Another study [20] investigated the effects of country image from four perspectives (i.e., economic, political, people, and international relationship image) on Korean consumers' purchase intentions for Chinese products. They reported that China's country-of-origin image had different effects on consumers' perceived value and purchase intentions.…”

“…Eventually, this influence leads to the motivation to procure foods from a given country, or vice versa [34]. With regards to the aforementioned considerations, and by considering the findings of [20] on the effects of COO image, for this study, we hypothesize the following:…”

The Correlation between Self-esteem and Personal Characteristics of MZ Generation's Cosmetics Purchase

“…화장품구매는 소비자의 태도와 화장품을 구매하는 행위 사 이의 매개 역할을 하는 것으로 최종적으로 구매하는 의사결 정 과정에 있어 중요한 요소이다 (Cui, 2014). 화장품구매는 소 비자의 심리적•경제적•사회적인 태도를 포함하고 있다 .…”