Comparing Country-of-Origin Strategies: The Effectiveness of Explicit and Implicit Markers.

Abstract

This study compared the effects of implicit and explicit COO strategies. An experiment was conducted in which participants were presented with three advertisements using the same COO strategy, but each promoting a product from either Spain, France or Italy. The results showed that there was no difference between the COO strategies in their effects on attitude towards the advertisement, attitude towards the product and purchase intention. For the Spanish product, ‘Made in…’ had a better effect on attitude towards the product quality than the implicit strategies and both explicit strategies increased people’s ability to link the product to Spain. In contrast, implicit COO strategies resulted in better recall of the COO markers. Additionally, the Spanish product scored lower on all dependent variables than the French and Italian products. These results suggest that not all COO strategies are equally effective and that they might not work for all types of products.