The impact of country image and country-of-origin on the willingness to pay a premium price for fashion products: A cross-national analysis on developing countries

The constructs of country image and country-of-origin have been largely adopted in international marketing literature that has analysed them with respect to consumers’ purchasing behaviours (Veale and Quester 2009; Teas and Agarwal 2000). Nonetheless, scant empirical evidence has been provided with respect to their impact on price-related issues (Koschate-fischer, Diamantopoulos, and Oldenkotte 2012; Agrawal and Kamakura 1999): to what extent are consumers more willing to pay premium prices for a particular product category from a foreign market? Is this difference, if any, country specific? This paper provides first empirical evidence of a cross-national analysis on developing countries over consumers’ willingness to pay premium prices for Italian fashion products. In doing that, we distinguish between country image, as the image consumers have of Italy as a country, and country of origin, as the image consumers have of “Made in Italy” fashion product (Pucci, Simoni and Zanni, 2012). Results from an ordered logistic regression show that country image and country of origin are countries specific, presenting different roles in China, India, Thailand and Brazil. In particular, country image positively affects the willingness to pay of Chinese consumers, country of origin is positively related to willingness to pay for Italian consumers, while in Thailand only socio-demographic characteristics result significant. Finally, country image negatively affects (and country of origin image positively affects) the willingness to pay of Thailandese consumers. Empirical as well as theoretical implications are then explored at length in the paper.