Exploring the interaction effects between country of manufacture and country of design within the context of the sportswear industry in Thailand

Abstract

In recent decades, the growth of international trade and delocalisation been increasing with the advent of globalisation and nationalisation. Consequently, a proliferation of hybrid or bi-national products has emerged in the research of international marketing. A large body of studies agree that country of origin (COO) plays an important role on product evaluation, since a product consists of an array of information cues, and intrinsic (physical appearance) and extrinsic (price, brand or COO) compositions. There is a strong evidence that consumers usually use COO as one of the most important cues when making a judgement about a product. However, bi-national products raise a particular issue because they are associated to both country of manufacture (COM) and country of design (COD) constructs. The interaction effects between both cues are found to have a more powerlful effect than when only cue is presented (Bertoli and Resciniti, 2012). This study intends to decompose the COO construct into COM and COD constructs. Moreover, the roles of COM and COD on customers’ purchase intentions are investigated in order to provides practical implications for the sportswear industry, as well as consumption insights relating to the emerging market, Thailand. This research provides an in-depth examination of COM, COD and product involvement on consumers’ purchase intentions and customer perceived value (CPV). Thus, the research measures the effects of product familiarity in order to infer how consumers use country-related information in purchase decision-making. In addition, the research clarifies the role of CPV, which remains unclear regarding how consumers develop a product’s value through informational cues (COM and COD). Moreover, the previous research have only examined the outcomes of perceived quality as influenced by COO. Hence, this research intends to bring all dimensions of CPV to investigate whether the combined effects of COM and COD can have either a positive or a negative impact on customer’s value. A model of CPV is developed by Sweeney and Soutat (2001), which consists of quality, social, price and emotional values. A quantitative approach using experimental research design was conducted in Bangkok, Thailand for the purposes of this study, with a pilot test to ascertain the variables used in the main experiment: product involvement, favourable/least favourable COM and COD images. The experiment was designed to measure the relationship between constructs, of a high involvement product, namely sports trainers, and a low involvement product, namely sports t-shirt. The US and China were selected as the most and the least favourite COD, resepectively. Meanwhile, Japan and China were selected as the most and least favourite COM, respectively. Data analysis techniques such as analysis of varaince (ANOVA), multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), and t-test were employed for hypothesis testing. The results of this research demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of the interaction effects of country image and product involvement. The study confirms that COD is the salient cue for the evaluation of sportswear products in emerging countries. However, the level of product involvement does not influence the consumer’s decisions when COD and COM are both presented. Thus, the roles of COM, COD and product invovlement play an important role in evaluating overall CPV. The key contribution of this research is in its practical, theoretical and methodological implications to international marketing communications toward the sportswear industry. It offers the insights of two informational cues (COM and COD) to explain the phenomenon of bi-national products for unknown or new products.