Country-of-Origin Ecological Image: Exploring the Construct Dimensions Across France and Australia: An Abstract

Abstract

Over the course of the past 40 years, there have been numerous policies and practices established by governments, corporations, and consumers seeking to address the environmental and social problems facing the world. As a result of these activities, consumers are considering the potential impact of sustainability issues which affect their purchasing decisions respective to ecological products. Thus, consumers are now seeking further information on the origin of products they are purchasing, where frequent amount of studies have demonstrated that country-of-origin (COO) information can strongly affect consumers’ behavior. Nevertheless, this extensive literature poorly considers the impact of environmental and social aspects of origins. In fact, countries do vary in their seriousness in treating environmental and social issues and thus, project different ecological images. However, and to the best of our knowledge, no research has investigated the country of origin ecological image construct before. Hence, this study proposes to give insights into its nature and dimensions. To fill this objective, and based on the exploratory nature of the research, we conducted a qualitative study with a sample of 23 professionals in the field of sustainable marketing (15 in France and 9 in Australia) and 3 focus groups with consumers (1 in France and 2 in Australia). The findings of the study suggest that the COO ecological image construct is composed of eight dimensions: political, technological, economic, historical, natural, climatic, people’s characteristics, and the eco-product dimension. Consequently, theoretical and practical implications of the findings for companies and society are also discussed.