“Made in Japan” vs “Made in Germany”: An Application of the Implicit Association Test to the Study of the Country-of-Origin Effect

Research on the Country-of-OriginEffect (COO-effect) reveals that the place of origin of a given product can affect consumers’ purchase choices positively or negatively, depending on the positive or negative beliefs consumers associate with that place. Certain products are perceived as better than others because they enjoy the positive association with a particular country, and marketers can benefit from emphasizing and promoting information about the country of origin when it enjoys positive stereotypes by extolling the geographical origin of the product, for example, through packaging and communication tools. A positive country-of-origin reputation amplifies the product’s perceived value, favoring its purchase by consumers. To the best of our knowledge, studies regarding this psychological effect have always been conducted on an explicit level through traditional research tools, such as questionnaires, which measure cognitive and affective constructs consciously held and stated by respondents. The problem for marketers is that people do not always want (or are able) to say what they think; even if they do, their behaviors are not always consistent with what they say. As a result, the results of market surveys conducted with traditional tools such as questionnaires may not always be reliable and may be characterized by reduced predictive ability. To better predict purchasing behavior, it is also necessary to analyze implicit constructs of which people are unaware, which, together with explicit cognitions (consciously accessed), guide their purchasing behavior. In our research, we apply to the study of COO-effect a test for measuring implicit constructs within a lab experiment involving 50 participants. Specifically, we investigated the degree of innovativeness perceived by Italian consumers concerning “Made in Germany” products, on the one hand, and “Made in Japan” products, on the other, both at the explicit level (through a questionnaire) and at the implicit level (through participation in a Implicit Association Test). This dual approach makes our research original; to the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the COO-effect has also been analyzed on the implicit level, and our lab experiment was designed and implemented precisely to provide an initial answer to this methodological gap. The research confirms our initial working hypothesis that Italian consumers are inclined to relate the dimension of innovativeness more strongly to the COO label “Made in Japan” (vs the label “Made in Germany”). From comparing the results that emerged via Questionnaire and IAT, we found that on the implicit level there was not as marked a difference in perceived innovativeness as that which emerged on the explicit level, and that 52% of the participants manifested inconsistency between what they stated explicitly in the Questionnaire and what emerged on the implicit level via the IAT. Some managerial implications and limitations of our study are finally discussed.