As globalization has contributed to the increased availability of foreign products across global markets, it is nowadays believed by some that a prerequisite for being able to compete on increased competitive levels is to adapt a global perspective. In this sense, marketing strategies aimed at promoting brands and products must be designed to function even on a global scale. Whereas it has in the past been useful to associate brands and products to specific nations in order to create an exotic appeal, it is questionable if such a marketing strategy would be of use today.   With this in mind, this thesis aims to answer why associating a brand to a nation would be used as a marketing strategy and how such an association would be expressed in practice by having performed a single case-study of the company of Orrefors Kosta Boda and its two brands’ marketing activities.   What this study concludes is that the main reason as to why Orrefors Kosta Boda’s two brands are associated to Swedish attributes, which are both positive and unique, is that there is a belief that this strategy allows the brands to be differentiated from other brands, and hence increases both brands’ equity. In addition, this study concludes that associations to Swedish attributes are developed by using a combination of two strategies, namely those of the country-of-origin strategy which serves to emphasize upon the products’ Swedish origin in terms of production and quality, and the culture-of-brand-origin strategy which is aimed at communicating culture-based symbolic attributes assigned to, amongst many, the brands’ heritages.

Denna studie undersöker om Sverige som produktland ger ett mervärde åt produkter relaterade till Sverige på den australiensiska markanden. Studien är grundad på en enkätstudie som utfördes på 67 personer i Toowoomba, Australien. Kopplingen till ett lands mervärde ligger i kundens uppfattning till de land de förknippar produkten med, något som kan förstärkas eller minskas. Studien visar att över 90 % av de tillfrågade kände till Ericsson, IKEA och Volvo medan drygt hälften kände till Absolut. De hade alla en starkare produktnisch än Sverige som nation. Det gör att jag bedömer att dessa företag/varumärken inte drar någon större fördel av ursprungsbemärkningen ”made in Sweden”. Ett varumärke som svenska företag/produkter, med begränsade resurser, kan dra nytta i introduktionsstadiet för att skapa ett större igenkännande bland kunder. / This study examines to what extent Swedish products receive any added-value as a result of their relationship to Sweden on the Australian market. The work is based upon a survey with 67 people in Toowoomba, Australia. An added-value is connected to a country by customers’ thoughts of that country in relation to the products they produce, something which can be magnified or extracted. This survey shows that over 90% of the respondents knew Ericsson, IKEA and Volvo and more then half knew Absolut. These companies all had a stronger product niche than Sweden as a hole whereby I do not find that these companies/brands gain directly from the country-of-origin effect of “made in Sweden”. Something a new company/brand could use to gain stronger recognition, with limited recourses, in the introduction stage to the new market.

No description available.

Purpose of this paper: This paper aims at studying which marketing opportunities companies back-shoring to France can leverage through Mass Media communication. Design/methodology/approach: 2 analyses are performed: a Media analysis studies the message that is sent to consumers. A survey is then carried out to discover how consumers perceive what is broadcast. Hypotheses are designed based on the former, and guide the design of the survey. The discussion and analyses are made under a marketing approach. Findings: The phenomenon is globally understood, but Media are not always necessarily the most appropriate tool for back-shoring companies to communicate about the three marketing dimensions identified during Media analysis: Made-in-France, Social issues related to Sustainable Development and the Impact of Political Messages. Research limitations/implications: The analyses are restricted to a study of French Mass Media, and of French consumers. Therefore, this study cannot be generalized to other countries. What is original/value of paper: This paper helps complete the limited literature on back-shoring, especially in the area of Marketing. This study intends to benefit back-shoring companies willing to develop their marketing strategy.

When deciding to internationalize, companies face the need to develop a foreign market strategy and a foreign market expansion strategy especially when the foreign country has very different culture from home country. Most research of company process of internationalization nevertheless is based on entry mode and mostly successful businesses. Here, the failure of joint venture between Marks and Spencer (M&S), one of the biggest of British Retail Company and Uni-President Corporation, the biggest food and drink enterprise in Taiwan is examined. Its recent large-scale withdrawal from such activity is also measured to some extend of theories about internationalization and marketing failure. The qualitative method and a case study were carried out. In addition, in-depth interviews with Uni-President representative, M&S Visual Display Manager and two groups of M&S customers and non M&S customers are the primary resources of data. The research suggested the joint venture between the two companies created many problems due to two extremely different cultures and lack of understanding of the local market. M&S marketing strategy did not draw Taiwanese consumers¡¦ interest. The products and stores are not attractive or follow the fashion trend. The promotion also did not appeal the consumers. The complexities of Taiwanese consumers¡¦ perspective toward M&S brand and country-of-origin, cultural differences and the potential reasons of M&S exited Taiwan are as well emphasized.

The pursuit of beauty in today's society is growing day by day. According to ITIS report about cosmetic industry development trend in 2010, the global cosmetics market in 2009 reached 3,474 billion U.S. dollars, twice as much as nine years ago. Cosmetic industry in Taiwan began to flourish since 1960s. Taiwan cosmetic industry is filled with United States, European and Japanese brands until 1990s. Promoted by government policy, many domestic brands emerge in 2000s. At this point, the Korean cosmetic brands entered Taiwan, making Taiwan cosmetic market more diverse and more competitive. The Korean cosmetic brands became more popular among the youth, and opened lots of stores. This study chose top 3 Korean cosmetic brands: The Face Shop, Skin Food, Etude House to understand what values the Korean cosmetic stores provide, and how the Korean cosmetic stores can survive and grow. So, this study has four major objectives: 1. To understand the correlation between service quality, customer value and customer satisfaction in Korean cosmetic stores. 2. To explore the impact of consumption emotions on customer satisfaction. 3. To understand the effect of country of origin on customer satisfaction. 4. To analyze the influence of different levels of consumer innovativeness on customer satisfaction. This study uses personal interview and online questionnaire to investigate the consumers of The Face Shop¡BSkin Food¡BEtude House.The results include: 1. Customer value is a mediator between service quality and customer satisfaction. 2. Different utilitarian values have no significant influence on customer satisfaction; different hedonic values have significant difference on customer satisfaction. 3. The main effects of country of origin, consumer innovativeness and consumption emotions have significant influence on customer satisfaction.

The final implementation of Mandatory Country-of-Origin Labeling has caused some U.S. packing plants and finishing operations to discontinue using Canadian live hogs and feeder pigs in their operations thereby reducing trade. Using a system of simultaneous equations representing U.S. import demand and U.S. price, this thesis estimates the reduction in trade and any possible price effects in both live hogs and feeder pigs associated with the implementation of the final rule of Mandatory Country of Origin Labeling in the United States. It was found that the implementation of Mandatory Country of Origin Labeling reduced the trade of live hogs between the United States and Canada by 37.8 percent. The reduction in feeder pigs was 24.1 percent. It was also found that the implementation of Mandatory Country of Origin Labeling had no effect on the price of both live hogs and feeder pigs in the U.S. market.

Modern people pursue skin beauty no longer stays at the stage of basic skin maintenance. Some of them turn to the assist of cosmetic surgery, but some choose to use low-risk and good-effect cosmeceuticals. Recently, the fast growth of beauty care market scale has attracted lots of leading cosmetics brands going to the segmentation of market. Especially, as consumers face many products to choose from, whether country-of-origin and consumers¡¦ product knowledge affect their purchase intention becomes the main point of this study. Furthermore, the study also seeks to explore the customer¡¦s satisfaction toward different Country-of-Origin(COO) and the effect of COO on customer¡¦s satisfaction through using demographics variables and channel types as mediating variables. On the other hand, the relationship between demographics variables and channel types is also worthwhile to examine. This study selects the consumers who have ever used cosmeceuticals from America, France, or Taiwan as the study objects. The results show as the following. First, this study discovers that self-selective and online shopping are the channels which consumers often have access to. Second, the finding also supports that both of COO and consumer¡¦s product knowledge have positive effect on consumer¡¦s purchase intention. Third, consumers using French products are more satisfied than ones using Taiwan¡¦s products. Last, the influence of COO on purchase intention for neither demographics variable nor channel types are not significant.

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.

COO is a construct that refers to the country which a consumer associates a certain product or brand as being its source, regardless of where the product is actually produced. Scholars like Magnusson et al. (2011) argue that COO is a salient cue in consumers’ product evaluation and purchase intention. In contrast, Usunier (2006; 2011) and Samiee (2010) criticize the COO effect, by explaining that due to multinational production, integrated worldwide supply chains and global branding there are other cues that have become more salient in consumers’ decision- making process. The purpose of this thesis is to extend the understanding about the relationship of COO in consumers buying process. The research questions followed: To what extent does country of origin influence consumers’ product evaluations and purchase intention? To what extent does the level of involvement affect the relationship between country of origin and consumers’ product evaluation? To what extent does the level of involvement affect the relationship between country of origin and consumers’ purchase intentions. Applying a deductive approach, a quantitative research has been chosen for this thesis involving survey as the source for data collection in order to test this research four main concepts: COO, product evaluation, purchase intention and product involvement. The findings indicated that COO has a significant direct effect in consumers’ product evaluations and purchase intention. The results also indicated on that when consumers’ perceive products to be low involvement, the COO effect is greater in consumers’ decision-making process.