The impacts of country-of-origin effect, endorser expertise, and product involvement on product attitude and purchase intention

Under globalizing trend, consumers have a lot of chances to purchase foreign goods. Consumers are easily to search product information via internet and make purchase decisions according to the information collected. Some consumers would evaluate product quality according to the country of origin. Past researches showed customers would take country of origin of products as important criteria to make purchase decisions. Generally speaking, consumers of developed countries would have higher perceived risk on products of developing countries. Consumers of developing countries would have less confidence on their own products. Therefore, how to reduce the negative influences from inferior country of origin is an important research issue. In this paper, we take digital still camera (DSC) as our research object. We conducted experimental design by manipulating country of origin (high vs. low) and endorser expertise (high vs. low). Besides, we came out our hypothesis by source credibility and elaboration likelihood model (ELM). We found that country-of-origin image and endorser expertise had positive effects on product attitude and purchase intention. Besides, respondents with lower product involvement are more easily influenced by country of origin and endorser expertise.