Thesis (M.A.)--Carleton University, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 136-152). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

This thesis was concerned with the branch of Consumer Marketing known as Consumer Perception Reasoning, and focused on the reasoning behind the Country-of-Origin Effect and image framing on product selling and promotion effectiveness. The well-established research comprising Country-of-Origin was reviewed to establish a rapport for further research exploring reasons that shape existing consumer attitude. With regard to reasoning, different social, political and cultural variables were explored. It was hypothesized that that the majority of Canadians, separated by ethnic origin, are partial to the same reasoning motivating their appeal toward East Asian country-of-origin effects, and therefore, can be categorized into different ethnocentric buying groups. The primary rationale citied was consumer ethnocentrism between the participants and the images; country-of-origin was the basis of this research. An experimental design was performed, making use of real world political and economical issues present in mass media to form a post exposure questionnaire. Overall, the two-way interaction between perception reasoning and cultural values was upheld, albeit with interesting and notable secondary results. Although Western values did shape the majority of consumer opinion, there was a significant lack in country-of-origin knowledge and experience that caused inaccurate perception motivation. This lack created a greater dislike toward the Taiwanese COO tag resulting from image transferability from the Chinese tag. As well, consumer gender played a significant part in shaping perception motivation toward each of the real-time variables. This was the first study to explicitly the Country-of-Origin Effect to a cross-variable framework, thereby offering significant theoretical contributions to the consumer marketing literature.