Investigating Relationship between Internal Structure of Country Image and Product Attitude

The formation of consumer's attitudes toward products is rooted in different factors, including pricing, packaging, product design, brand, etc. Among these, this study examines the manufacturer's country, which in the international marketing literature is referred to as the Country image, and the relationships between its comprising components. Graduate and postdoctoral students of Ferdowsi University of Mashhad are considered as research population. The selected product in order to study the attitude is Automobile and four selected countries for studying country image are Germany, Japan, South Korea, and China. Research data are acquainted and analyzed through 390 questionnaires distributed in June and July, 2013, in which the Cronbach's alpha is calculated as 0.91. Research hypotheses were tested by multiple regressions technique using SPSS 16.0 tool. Results confirm the triple structure of country image, indicating the country image's effect on product attitude. Furthermore, according to study results, cognitive component of the Country image has the most significant impact on the Beliefs. it's affective component has the most significant impact on the evaluation and conative component of the country image has the most significant impact on the purchase intention. Regarding to the internal structure of the Country image, results confirmed cognitive component's influence on affective component; while the impacts of the affective component on conative component and cognitive component on conative component were not supported by research findings