DOES COUNTRY OF ORIGIN MATTER IN FACE OF STRONG GLOBAL BRANDS?

Abstract

This paper aims to compare the impact of country of origin and brand’s aspects on young consumers’ willingness to buy global brands. We chose the United States because this country is the origin of the most valuable global brands, besides arousing contradictory opinions and feelings, as well as reactions of love and hate. The brands Apple, Levi’s and McDonald's, represent products and services, all of them recognized as global and US iconic brands, at the same time: Apple has been admired and followed; McDonald’s has been used as a symbol in political demonstrations against the United States or against globalization, while some protesters wear Levi’s jeans. The tested constructs include aspects related to country of origin (Country Image, Country Affinity, Ethnocentrism) and brand (Brand Personality and Self-Brand Connection). We conducted a survey with 367 students, potential consumers of the brands, and applied Structural Equation Modelling to analyze the impacts of constructs on their willingness to buy. The results indicate that consumer-brand relationship showed greater strength and significance than other constructs, highlighting that during purchasing it is more important how the consumer perceives himself in relation to the brand than the way he perceives or feels about brand’s country of origin. We deliberately chose brands of high brand equity for analysis, but in the future, the model could be applied to low brand equity brands, not-iconic brands, other countries and its brands, and other product categories.