The Effects of Country-of-Origin Image, Ethnocentrism and Subjective Norm on Consumers’ Evaluation of Foreign Products

The primary goal is to provide further clarifications on the complex issue of country-of-origin image cognitive processing and structure. Data were collected from college students of South Korea, to whom applied a Chinese laptop computer. A total of 249 usable questionnaires were returned. For the test of the hypotheses the LISREL Ver. 8.12 software was used. It is verified that a positive and significant influence of product evaluation on purchase intention, but it does not appear any significant influence of product beliefs on purchase intention. Regarding the consumer knowledge effects on products, those with whom the knowledge is low, the country-of-origin image has more of an impact on product beliefs rather than product evaluation. However, those with whom the knowledge is high, the product evaluation are more influenced by country-of-origin image. Consumers' ethnocentrism, as far as the results concerned, are not significant influential factor to product evaluation and buy intention; however, the consumers' subjective norms are very significant positive influential factor to buy intention. Rather than a large sample of actual consumers, in this study, adopting the students sample may be pointed out as a limitation. Future research will be needed to take an extensive general sample of consumers for more specific study of country-of-origin image.