THE INTERACTION OF TWO-DIMENSIONAL COUNTRY-OF-ORIGIN EFFECT and CONSUMER ETHNOCENTRISM

Today, as companies have increasingly been producing in developing countries, the emerging image problem leads to the widespread use of county-of-design labelling. In parallel to that, county-of origin has been studied as a multi-dimensional concept in the literature. In this study, county-of-origin has been examined with two dimensions as county-of-manufacturing (COM) and country-of-design (COD). In particular, we study whether Turkish consumers process the country-of-manufacturing and country-of-design information in their product evaluations, and how these variables interact with each other as well as with consumer ethnocentrism. In the analyses, country-of-origin variables were treated to have three levels; a developed country (USA), a developing country (Bangladesh) and Turkey. We used 3*3 full factorial experimental design and gathered data from an initial sample size of 490 consumers. After eliminating the responses that do not correctly remember the experimental manipulation of COM and COD, we had a final sample size of 329. Upon conducting ANCOVA, while we found that COM significantly effects consumers’ product evaluations, the impact of COD has been found as insignificant. Our results also showed that the impact of the interaction effect between consumer ethnocentrism and country-of-manufacturing on consumer product evaluations has been found as significant. More specifically, consumers with high consumer ethnocentrism scores, evaluated the product with USA county-of-manufacturing information significantly lower than Turkey county-of-manufacturing information whereas a reverse effect has been found for consumers with low consumer ethnocentrism scores