Country-of-origin cues: effects of country-related affect and product association on consumer responses to hospitality firms
International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management
ISSN: 0959-6119
Article publication date: 8 June 2021
Issue publication date: 6 July 2021
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to investigate the impacts of country-of-origin (COO) cues, country-related affect (CRA) and country-related product associations (CRPA) on consumers’ intention to purchase hotel services.
Design/methodology/approach
A survey of 305 respondents was conducted. Mediation and conditional process tests were performed to examine the proposed theoretical framework.
Findings
The results suggest that CRA is positively correlated with consumer trust, which, in turn, affects purchase intention. For consumers with a high (vs low) level of consumer ethnocentrism (CE), the effect of CRA on trust is weaker. CRPA is positively correlated with both consumer trust and price perception, which, in turn, affect purchase intention. For consumers with rich subjective knowledge (SK) of hotel services, the effect of CRPA on price perception is weaker. The effects of COO stereotypes and the moderation effects of CE and SK hold after controlling for consumers’ age, gender, income, education and objective knowledge.
Practical implications
Hospitality practitioners can make use of different types of country-related information to communicate effectively with consumers in a global environment.
Originality/value
This research is the first to discover the different mechanisms underlying different types of COO and the boundary conditions on these effects.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a grant from the Humanity and Social Science Youth Foundation of the Ministry of Education of China (No. 19YJC630070) awarded to Dongmei Li and the grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71772186, No. 72072187), the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (No. 2021A1515011439) awarded to Lishan Xie. The authors gratefully acknowledge the research assistance of MIRAMONT Victor, Benjamin, Olivier in the early stages of data collection.
Citation
Li, D. and Xie, L. (2021), "Country-of-origin cues: effects of country-related affect and product association on consumer responses to hospitality firms", International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Vol. 33 No. 5, pp. 1789-1809. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-11-2020-1324
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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