Weakening the Effect of Unfavorable Country of Origin: A Process- and Parameter-Associated Theoretical Framework

ABSTRACT

The consequence of strategic decisions of Western brands to source their products from offshore countries, largely from the Far East, has added a lot of unfavorable origin countries to their products' labels. Thus, scholars and marketing practitioners are becoming aware of the negative downstream consequences of unfavorable countries of origin in consumers' product evaluation. This research work suggests that, depending on the parameters (cues) that consumers consider along with the country of origin cue, their product evaluation can follow either cognitive, affective, or normative processing. This research study offers a unique framework associated with process-specific parameters that are manifested in weakening the effect of unfavorable country of origin in previous research.