Track: Business Management

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to offer a new perspective of Country of Origin effects on consumers’ brand personality of domestic versus imported automobiles. It aims to assess the perceived differences between automobiles with same brand but produced by different two countries, moreover the consumer distinguised upon involvement level segmentation.

This is an experimental design study with Cluster Analysis to classify consumer involvement level and the main analysis is MANOVA. The study investigated the impact of longitudinal experimental set of treatments on participant brand personality who are owners’ of  two consimilar cars: Toyota cars made in Indonesia; and cars from Japan which then originally imported.

The findings of the research indicates that Country of a Brand and Country of Manufacturing with clusters of consumer’s involvement level basis has various effect on consumers’ brand personality. This experimental research has recommended a concept Enduring Country of Manufacturing Effect which had two arguments, i.e. The country of manufacture exerts a greater enduring influence on the perceived personality than the country of brand. Furthermore, the local country of manufacture shown influence more to the enduring and situational involved level consumers cluster, in contrary, the response involved consumers level cluster tend to think otherwise.

Keywords: Country of Origin, Consumer Involvement Level, Brand Personality, Country of Brand, Country of Manufacturing