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The objective of the present research is to examine the impact of the country of origin of a brand on its consumer‐based equity.

Brand equity was conceptualized in this paper as a combination of brand awareness, brand associations, perceived quality and attitudinal brand loyalty. A doubly multivariate design was incorporated in a structured questionnaire to collect data via mall intercepts in an Australian capital city.

Multivariate analysis of variance of the data indicated that consumer‐based brand equity varied according to the country of origin of the brand and product category. This impact of country of origin on brand equity occurred where consumers perceived substantive differences between the countries in terms of their product category‐country associations.

An important direction for future research would be to examine how the consumer‐based equity of a brand would be affected, if the country of origin were changed from a country with weaker association with the product category to a country with strong association with the product category. The results would be useful to MNCs contemplating international manufacturing.

Marketing managers operating in the international context must identify the sources of brand equity, and understand the importance of incorporating country of origin into their brand equity measurement. Further, the results suggest that, when a brand offers a variety of product categories, brand managers should monitor and track the brand's consumer‐based equity for each product category.

The present study is one of the first to empirically examine and confirm the impact of country of origin on the consumer‐based equity of a brand.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how varying degrees of media-constructed associations between organizations and their home countries affect audience perceptions of such associations and, subsequently, how recipients attribute crisis responsibility and reputational damage to the home country. Additionally, the paper investigates if pre-crisis country image can buffer negative effects of the crisis for the country.

The authors hypothesize that the strength of actor associations in media reports about crises affects recipients’ cognitive processes of crisis responsibility attribution and, thus, the “direction” of reputational damage (corporation vs country). Empirically, the authors analyze the effects of different levels of actor association in crisis reports (strong actor association vs weak actor association) regarding a Chinese corporation in a one-factorial (between-subjects) experimental design; and the intervening effect of China’s country image prior to the crisis. Participants for the study lived in Switzerland and the USA.

The effect of different actor associations presented in the media on perceived association between a corporation and its home country is confirmed. Furthermore, these varying perceptions lead to significantly different tendencies in people’s ascriptions of crisis responsibility (corporation vs country), and different degrees of reputational fallout for the home countries. Finally, the data did not confirm a moderating effect of pre-crisis country image on the reputational damage caused by the crisis.

The study contributes to the understanding of key factors in the formation of crisis attributions as well as insights for the study of country image and public diplomacy.

It provides a new approach for corporate communication and public diplomacy to analyze the complex interdependencies between countries and internationally visible and globally known corporations, which potentially affect the country’s perception abroad.

Particularly for smaller countries that cannot rely on political and economic power to defend national interests in a global context, their “soft power” in terms of reputation and country image can play a central role in their political, economic, and cultural success.

The paper applies a new conceptual framework and methodology to analyze how both mediated and cognitive associations between different actors influence attribution of responsibility in crises, and how these associations ultimately bear on reputation spillover for the different actors.

Recent research has shown that the country-of-origin (COO) effect – the influence on consumers’ attitudes and purchase behavior derived from a brand’s perceived association with a country – is inextricably linked to consumer perception. The purpose of this paper is to examine this shift by considering origin as a characteristic derived from perceived association and also by proposing that this association varies by degree, rather than simply acting as a binary attribute in its effect on consumer attitudes.

Data from a test series in which respondents (n=100) rated 38 brand-country pairs were put to split-half multi-group analysis tests to capture the moderating influence of association strength (AS) on several facets of country image (CI) simultaneously.

AS is a variable that exerts a moderating influence on how different dimensions of CI influence consumers’ evaluation of brands.

The findings indicate that origin, as a characteristic, should be considered an association that is variable by degree and not as dichotomous. The implications of such a shift are broad, not only for the theoretical understanding of the COO effect but also for marketing and brand management practice. Accounting for AS allows for more accurate prediction of how consumers will react to COO.

The paper explicitly demonstrates that the strength of country-brand association moderates COO’s influence on brand equity. Such a relationship had previously only been theoretically implied but had not been empirically tested across multiple categories of products on multiple levels of CI.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the prevalence and types of country associations on product labels and packages across a range of grocery product categories.

An audit of New Zealand and Australian country associations as they appeared on products in 26 categories was conducted in a major New Zealand supermarket outlet.

The results of the content analysis of 788 brands revealed that the majority featured at least one country of origin (COO) association and indicated that they were either “made in” New Zealand or Australia.

Even though the findings are potentially restricted to the New Zealand context, this paper provides evidence of the prevalence of common and distinctive country associations across a diverse range of product categories. This suggests that these associations are still relevant to grocery manufacturers and supermarket retailers as a way of positioning their branded products.

The findings offer supermarket retailer buyers and regulatory agencies insight into the use of COO associations from the perspective of FMCG manufacturers. In addition, the findings provide FMCG manufacturers with an indication of the prevalence of different country associations in the categories that they compete.

In spite of debate about the costs and benefits of COO labelling and place references on grocery product packaging, little is known about how these associations are actually used by FMCG manufacturers. This paper addresses this question by auditing brands on the supermarket shelf.

Consumers' evaluations of brand extensions have gained considerable attention in the marketing literature. The purpose of this study is to investigate how a brand's perceived global or local origin impacts evaluations of brand extensions and creates transfer effects of brand meaning. The paper conceptually characterizes the transference process and empirically tests the nature and extent of spillover effects of origin associations across multiple parent brands and extensions.

For the empirical testing of the conceptual model of transfer effects of origin associations we undertook a cross‐sectional consumer survey amongst a sample of 267 Norwegian respondents. Structural equation modelling was used to investigate the causal relationships between the latent exogenous and endogenous variables in the conceptual model.

The present study indicates that the global and local origin framework, first introduced by Steenkamp et al. in 2003, can explain the occurrence of reciprocal transfer of brand meaning across parent brands and extensions. The paper shows that global and local origin associations operate in a manner very similar to brand associations in the transference of perceptions. It finds that distinct origin associations influence the pre‐brand image and drive the forward effect on the attitude towards the extension as well as the subsequent backward effect upon the post‐brand image of the parent brand.

This paper reveals for the first time that distinct origin associations can initiate spillover effects across parent brands and extensions. This study is therefore an important step towards the generalizability of main brand extension studies to other contexts such as extensions of global brands.

The paper seeks to discuss and analyse the nature of place umbrella brands and the role such brands play in promotion of a country, a region, or a city. The purpose is also to identify some salient success criteria of provenance associations as core values of place umbrella brands.

The study delineates a conceptual framework, which illustrates important components in place umbrella branding. It also highlights a set of criteria to aid prioritisations among prospective provenance associations that have a potential to be used as brand values of place umbrella brands.

The paper identifies some characteristics of provenance associations, which make them more transferable across a bundle of umbrella brand partners. The generation of better marketing theory in the field of place branding will make it easier for practitioners to reach the right decisions in choice of provenance associations.

It is claimed that transcendence is related to the transferability of provenance associations across a bundle of brands. Because transferability strongly depends on perceptions of similarity, the starting point is to identify matches between the partner brands based on their shared provenance.

The article ends with a recommendation that researchers in place branding should carefully analyze provenance associations according to the suggested criteria.

The country-of-origin effect (COO) has, as a research domain, suffered from several theoretical and methodological problems and tendencies including an incomplete conceptualization of its constituent components. The purpose of this study is to first problematize the concept in extant literature and to consequently propose a reconceptualization of the concept.

As part of lateral promulgation, the authors use theoretical and methodological ideas from other disciplines such as psychology, ethnography and geography to problematize the present conceptualization of COO in extant literature to reveal research possibilities relevant to, but underrepresented or absent in, COO research.

This study identifies several central theoretical and methodological problems and reveals that (1) COO is not necessarily linear and alternative modes of engagement with consumption need to be considered; (2) many of these problems can be addressed by alternative methodologies; and (3) COO operates at the level of symbolic orders that require a further engagement with the role of place in human experience.

The findings suggest that in future research, field experiments be considered to resolve some of the methodological artefacts that have hampered past research; qualitative methods be applied to uncover unexpected uses of place association beyond being mere quality proxies; and alternative areas of relevance, such as macro-level trade and exports from emerging economies, be entertained.

The study’s approach to problematizing and refining extant knowledge enable it to promulgate new knowledge and research directions for a research area that has historically suffered from a tendency to be self-referential.

This paper aims to show that the congruency between the source of a product being evaluated and the commonly held perceptions of that product's association with a country of origin (COO) leads to a more positive evaluation of that product.

This is an experimental study using two congruent product stimulus categories and two non‐congruent product categories, each associated with a Danish and a non‐Danish sounding brand name to elicit evaluation of product profiles from a sample of 187 young consumers.

Among all the variables included in the analysis of variance (ANOVA) tables, product‐country congruency performed the best. The second strongest main effect is attributed to familiarity with Danish products. The brand‐country congruence variable related only indirectly to the evaluation of products from Denmark through an interaction with product‐country congruence.

Future research should seek to build data sets from a larger number of adult consumers from several countries with more product and brand stimuli associated with multiple countries.

Consumers who are familiar with products made in Denmark should be the prime target market for products congruent with Denmark. Because of their strong association with Denmark, these products may benefit from their association with country of design (COD) Denmark in promotional programs.

Using cognitive‐consistency theory, this paper extends the previous literature on the perceptions of product‐country‐fit by including the effects of brand‐country fit, technological complexity, three dimensional conception of COO, and two separate product evaluation measures, using product‐country familiarity, product involvement and product experience as moderators.

The objective of this paper is to improve the knowledge about ethical content of franchising associations at a worldwide level.

To do this, the authors compared the content of 46 deontological codes of franchising associations from five continents to the standards established in the so‐called C‐40 or model of franchising deontological codes.

Results show that, in general, ethical content included in deontological codes of franchising associations is not very large, requiring progress in improving its structure and content. In any case, according to the contents of their deontological codes, there are two groups of franchising associations worldwide. On the one hand, those taking the archetype of the European Franchise Federation code (30 associations), which show a greater number of ethical issues and have a better structured code than the other group that do not follow the European code (16 associations).

Although currently the majority of franchisees and franchisors associations' have or are in the process of developing a deontological code, there is little knowledge about “how a good code should be”, “what is the content it must include to perform properly” and if “existing codes of franchise associations are appropriated”. The answer to these questions, given the existing gap in the literature, is the value of this work.

This work proposes to test the C‐40 deontological code of collective orientation specifically for franchise associations. The literature review revealed a lack of studies about this type of codes.

This code adopts a semi‐normative approach in trying to standardize what form a deontological code of a franchise association should take. The study has been developed from an international perspective, making easier its spread and generalization. Furthermore, a novel methodology in this area has been applied to test the code: “The Experton Theory”.

As a consequence, from the review of ethical and deontological codes from franchise associations of 46 countries, some associations' statutes and the laws about franchising in some countries, 29 topics were identified. Additionally, 11 more have been added to these contents, making 40 items which conform with what should be integrated into whatever franchising deontological code.

The main limitations of this work refer to the proposition and validation of some questions included in the C‐40 code. Specifically, some of them show opinion divergences of the experts' answers over 25 percent.

The proposed code might be used as a background for franchise associations at an international level. It encourages the increase of ethical and business contents in the existing codes and, therefore, the improvement of the relationships among franchisers, franchisees and the rest of the stakeholders.

This study is focused on a scarcely treated topic in the literature: deontological codes in franchising. In addition, it has been developed from an international perspective, making its spread and generalization easier.