THE EFFECT OF FASHION COLLECTION’S COUNTRY OF ORIGIN ON BRAND EVALUATION AND PURCHASE INTENTION : FOCUSING ON SEOUL, NEW YORK AND PARIS COLLECTION

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Today all nations in the world focus on remaining competitive advantage by adding high values to their fashion businesses. The most typical example of such added value is fashion collection. In case of London Fashion Week, which is among the world’s top 4 most famous fashion collections where more than 5,000 journalists and buyers from 25 nations can be expected every season, it has great contribution to the economic wealth of London. It induces consumption of 20 million GBP and economic production effects of one hundred million GBP. According to Joo (2009), one of the main purposes of fashion collections can be defined as the invigoration of international marketing and the creation of consumption demand. Fashion collections lead to increased direct sales and consumption demand by developing new products based on leading fashion trends that are presented in the collection. The so-called Big four collections in Paris, Milan, New York and London have their own Country of Origin (COO) image, which represents each country, cities, brands, products and services. For example, Paris collection has been established as luxury image with hand-made and Haute Couture. Not only fashion collection but also fashion brands have applied specific country characteristics to their fashion brand’s image. This serves as a critical factor of competitiveness that communicates an integrated image of brands to the customers. Also, within the purchase decision-making process, consumers consider COO as an important element. Therefore, organizer of fashion collections as well as brands that engage in such should consider COO as a key factor. Most of the previous studies about fashion collections focused on content analyses. For example, Joo (2009) compared characteristics and current situations between four major overseas cities’ collections and Seoul collection. Additionally, there are studies about fashion style, trend, design and textile. Characteristics of color change in 1990s fashion collection (Kim & Kim, 2007) and an analysis of design of hats and fashion images in collections (Jeong & Jeong, 2008) have been conducted as well. Previous studies related to COO mainly focused on the product (Bilkey & Nes, 1982) and how the image of the producing country affects product evaluation. Thus, the purposes of this study are 1) to examine of fashion collection’s COO and fashion brand image effects on brand evaluation and purchase intention, 2) to analyze differentiation factors of COO image, brand evaluation, purchasing intention on Seoul, New York and Paris collection. We surveyed Korean, American and French who have experience in their own country’s fashion collection and used SPSS 21 for data analysis. Fashion collection’s COO and brand image has a great effect on brand evaluation and purchase intention. Moreover, it seems to increase the purchase intention by affecting brand evaluation. Therefore, the results of the study are as follows. First, we can confirm that the better the fashion collection’s COO and fashion brand image, the higher brand evaluation and purchase intention is. Second, when assessing fashion collection’s COO image and fashion brand image, brand evaluation and purchase intention differ according to Korea, US and French national stereotypes. This study goes beyond the general product-centric COO studies and introduces the fashion collection’s COO that can be valuable research in terms of contribution not only to academia, but also to the industrial field.