The importance of ethical consumerism to many companies worldwide has increased dramatically in recent years. Ethical consumerism encompasses the importance of non-traditional and social components of a company's products and business process to strategic success – such as environmental protectionism, child labor practices and so on. The present paper utilizes a random utility theoretic experimental design to provide estimates of the relative value selected consumers place on the social features of products.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/25074960

What Will Consumers Pay for Social Product Features

Investigates the relationship between consumer ethnocentrism and consumer attitudes toward foreign manufactured products in product categories in which domestic alternatives are not available. Such decision situations (i.e. product choice in categories with no domestic alternative) are common for consumers in many smaller countries throughout Europe, and thus important for marketing managers to understand. It was hypothesised that individuals with high levels of consumer ethnocentrism would have more favourable attitudes toward products from culturally similar countries in comparison to products from culturally dissimilar countries. The values classification of culture proposed by Schwartz was used to establish cultural similarity, and the attitudes of a representative sample of New Zealand consumers were assessed using a nation‐wide mail survey. Our results suggest that cultural similarity is an important consideration for highly ethnocentric consumers in the evaluation of foreign products. A number of theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

Consumer ethnocentrism and attitudes toward domestic and foreign products

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the literature regarding the effect of country of origin on consumer perceptions of products and services. Results reveal that consumer perceptions differ significantly on the basis of product/service and country of origin. The country of origin may be an important element in the perceptions consumers have of products and services especially where little other information is known. However, the question of how much influence the country of origin provides in product and service evaluations remains unanswered and a number of other major issues have yet to be resolved. Directions for future research are developed.

Country of origin effects: a literature review

– The objective of the present research is to examine the impact of the country of origin of a brand on its consumer‐based equity., – Brand equity was conceptualized in this paper as a combination of brand awareness, brand associations, perceived quality and attitudinal brand loyalty. A doubly multivariate design was incorporated in a structured questionnaire to collect data via mall intercepts in an Australian capital city., – Multivariate analysis of variance of the data indicated that consumer‐based brand equity varied according to the country of origin of the brand and product category. This impact of country of origin on brand equity occurred where consumers perceived substantive differences between the countries in terms of their product category‐country associations., – An important direction for future research would be to examine how the consumer‐based equity of a brand would be affected, if the country of origin were changed from a country with weaker association with the product category to a country with strong association with the product category. The results would be useful to MNCs contemplating international manufacturing., – Marketing managers operating in the international context must identify the sources of brand equity, and understand the importance of incorporating country of origin into their brand equity measurement. Further, the results suggest that, when a brand offers a variety of product categories, brand managers should monitor and track the brand's consumer‐based equity for each product category., – The present study is one of the first to empirically examine and confirm the impact of country of origin on the consumer‐based equity of a brand.

Consumer‐based brand equity and country‐of‐origin relationships: Some empirical evidence

This empirical study focusses on consumers’ attitude to low‐involvement products, bread and coffee, in a newly‐industrialized nation. Using data from 236 consumers in Singapore, the study examines the influence of country of origin (COO) relative to other product attributes in consumers’ evaluation of domestic and foreign food products. The results indicate that COO does matter when consumers evaluate low‐involvement products but, in the presence of other extrinsic cues (price and brand), the impact of COO is weak and brand becomes the determinant factor. In addition, the results suggest that a country's positive image in some product categories does not necessarily carry over to other product categories. The implications of these findings for marketing food products internationally are discussed.

Does country of origin matter for low‐involvement products?

Uses conjoint analysis to investigate the relative importance of the country of origin of a product to consumers in the United States, Canada, Germany and The Netherlands. It was found that the country of origin of a product was one of the two or three most important attributes in preference evaluation. Across the four countries and the two product categories studied, the importance weight assigned to the country‐of‐origin factor ranged from 18 to 29 per cent, a level of importance that was often equal to or greater than that assigned to the brand name, price and other intrinsic and extrinsic attributes. Respondents in each country preferred domestically‐made products foremost, followed by products made in other developed countries and, lastly, products made in developing countries.

The Importance of Product Country of Origin

The Nigerian consumer obsession with foreign-made goods has had a detrimental effect on the domestic manufacturing industry. This paper uses conjoint analysis to investigate the importance of a product's country-of-manufacture relative to other attributes in the Nigerian consumer choice. It was found that the country-of-manufacture is significantly more important than price and other product attributes in consumer preference. Nigerian consumers have a negative image of the ‘Made in Nigeria’ label, rating it lower than labels from more economically developed countries. Additional analyses indicate that the superior reliability and technological advancement of foreign products are the most important correlates of the Nigerian consumer's likelihood to purchase foreign products. Implications for foreign marketers, domestic governments and domestic manufacturers are discussed.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fpalgrave.jibs.8490086.pdf

Nigerian Consumer Attitudes Toward Foreign and Domestic Products

This study investigates the impact of job satisfaction and personal values on the work orientation of accounting practitioners in China. Satisfaction with work varies across individuals and how individuals view work (i.e., work orientation) may depend not only on satisfaction with various facets of their work but also on their beliefs and values. We used the questionnaire from Wrzesniewski et al. (J Res Pers 31, 21–33, 1997) to measure work orientation. Job satisfaction was measured by the Job Descriptive Index (JDI) developed by Smith et al. (The Measurement of Satisfaction in Work and Retirement. Rand McNally, Skokie, IL, 1969) and personal values were measured by the Schwartz Value Questionnaire Survey (Schwartz, Adv Exp Social Psychol 25, 1–65, 1992). Our sample consisted of 370 accounting practitioners from six major cities in China; 268 were females and 102 were males. We found that 41.9 % of the respondents viewed their work as a career, 37.6 % as a calling and 20.5 % as a job and that job satisfaction to be the highest among the “calling” group and lowest among the “job” group. There were no significant gender differences in the work orientation of the respondents. Our study showed that the value types achievement and hedonism and satisfaction with promotion were significant predictors of the career orientation, while the value type benevolence and satisfaction with the present job were predictors of the calling orientation. Dissatisfaction with work was the major predictor of the job orientation. Furthermore, length of employment was positively associated with both the calling and job orientation, but negatively associated with the career orientation.

Impact of Job Satisfaction and Personal Values on the Work Orientation of Chinese Accounting Practitioners

The relationships of prior knowledge and involvement to advertising recall and evaluation

This study investigates the relationships of the managerial characteristics of supervisory ability, achievement motivation, intellectual ability, self-actualization, self-assurance, and decisiveness to the assessment of managerial effectiveness in Hong Kong and the People's Republic of China relative to a Western country such as Canada. It was found that, as in Canada, several of these managerial characteristics were significant predictors of managerial effectiveness in the Eastern cultures. In addition, senior managers in the PRC were quite similar to their counterparts in Canada, but differed from those in Hong Kong, in their use of these characteristics in inferring the effectiveness of their subordinates. Self-actualization was the most important predictor of managerial effectiveness rating in Canada, self-assurance in Hong Kong, and intellectual ability in the PRC. Supervisory ability was the second most important predictor in each country.

Chike Okechuku

Papers

The Importance of Product Country of Origin

Nigerian Consumer Attitudes Toward Foreign and Domestic Products

Impact of Job Satisfaction and Personal Values on the Work Orientation of Chinese Accounting Practitioners

The relationships of prior knowledge and involvement to advertising recall and evaluation

The relationship of six managerial characteristics to the assessment of managerial effectiveness in Canada, Hong Kong and People's Republic of China