When a consumer evaluates a brand in the marketplace, she often uses her perceived brand or product image, or the image of the country-of-origin (COO) as an important piece of information. For a foreign brand or product, the perceived image of the COO plays an even more important role in the consumer's evaluation of the brand or product. Previous studies on the COO effects have primarily focused on revealing the existence and/or the nature of the COO effects on the consumer's product or brand evaluation.
This thesis investigates the relationships among consumer characteristics, their perceived image, knowledge, and familiarity with the COO, and their attitude toward the COO in their product or brand evaluation process. In the first part, after introducing the COO related basic concepts, major previous findings in the related literature are summarized. The, a LISREL model is presented that shows the relationships among the consumer's COO image, perceived product quality, the consumer's amount of knowledge about and the familiarity with the COO, perception of similarity of the COO with her or his country, perceived amount of threats of the COO toward her or his country, and the attitude toward the COO, a consumer's perception of national characters and attitude toward the COO, and product evaluations. Using survey data collected from U.S.A, Germany, and Hungary for Korean and Japanese products, our LISREL model was put to a test. The results support hypotheses that perceived image of the COO is related to perceived product quality, the consumer's familiarity with the COO moderates the effects of attitude toward COO on the product evaluation.
In the second part, a three step market segmentation scheme is presented that utilized the brand co-occurrence information of consumer's purcahse sets. It provides a consistent framework that can identify market structures and market segments for low shared foreign brands. Our segmentation reveals three distinctive market segments, An analysis of members in each segment shows that the customers in different segments are distinctive in their demographic profiles, have distinctive image toward the COO and toward the brand, have different perceptions of major brand attributes, resulting in distinctive brand choices.
In the third part, the three step market segmentation scheme is applied to the television broadcasting market. The application shows that our segmentation scheme developed to analyze distinctive brand evaluation segments for foreign brands is a versatile tool that can be successfully used to analyze the media consumption behavior. The segmentation information of the media market can be extremely valuable in media planning for advertisers and marketing managers.
