The Role of “Consumer Need for Uniqueness” and Product Typicality in Explaining Variation of Country of Origin Effects

Abstract

Certain product categories, such as cars, software, and even perfume, are strongly identified with certain countries (Kotler and Gertner 2002) (e.g., French perfume; German cars, etc), but not all the products of a country benefit the same from a strong COO image. However, despite the prolificacy of COO-related studies, the observed effects are subject to contextual variations that remain unexplained. As research evidence shows, one of main unexplained variations of COO effects is the variation across product categories (Balabanis and Diamantopoulos 2004; Han and Terpstra 1988; Kaynak and Cavusgil 1983; Roth and Romeo 1992).