Decomposing the Country-of-Origin Construct

This study presents an extension of prior work by decomposing the country-of-origin construct into three components: country of product design, country of parts manufacture and country of product assembly, followed by an empirical test of all three component effects. A sample of 467 U.S. and 411 Mexican respondents was presented advertisements for three consumer products featuring product design, parts manufacture and assembly in various combinations of three different countries. Results indicate that these three country-of-origin components do affect consumer perceptions of design quality, manufacturing quality and overall quality for each product in distinctly different ways in both countries.