The Impacts of Country-of-Origin, Product Involvement, and Product Familiarity on Product Evaluation

One of the most interesting phenomena in the global business practices is the existence of product's country-of-origin (COO). COO as an informational cue has been proven to affect consumer's purchasing decision in terms of their perception toward the product's attributes as well as their overall evaluation of the product. The objective of this study is to investigate the impacts of country-of-origin on the product evaluation in the Indonesian market by considering consumers' product familiarity and consumers' product involvement. Consumers' perception of the country where the product comes from is assumed to give significant influence to consumers' considerations in evaluating the product prior to purchase. This influence is supposedly moderated by to what extent consumers are familiar with product attributes and to what extent the product is important and interesting for them. A survey design was employed to test the proposed linkages among variables. The target population of the survey is Indonesian consumers of imported products. The sample unit is the person who has experience in buying or consuming foreign products. The samples of 307 persons are drawn from Yogyakarta. This study examined LED television to represent a high involvement product. The country stimuli are Korea and Indonesia . The study applied the regression analyses and hierarchical moderated regression to test the proposed hypotheses. The study found that: (1) Indonesian consumers associate positively product's country-of-origin with their decision in evaluating the product prior to purchase for both Indonesian and Korean Products, (2) Indonesian consumers consider the level of economic development of the country-of-origin in evaluating the product prior to purchase in which the effect of country-of-origin is stronger for Korean product than Indonesian product, (3) Indonesian consumers with different levels of product familiarity do not evaluate product differently for both Indonesian and Korean products, (4) Indonesian consumers with different levels of product involvement evaluate Korean product differently