Country-of-Manufacture Effects on Consumer Choice

In modern market, consumer choice behavior attracts attention from researchers and manufacturers for its importance and unpredictability; assessing what makes a consumer buy a product is critical for an enterprise. When considering a multinational product, literature proves that country-of-manufacture (COM) image does affect consumer choice behavior, but few explore how deep COO image may go in consumers mind. Brand choice models represent the underlying process by which an individual consumer integrates information to select a brand from a set of competing brands, they are used to evaluate a consumer's choice probability of a product among competing products. This study aims at evaluating female consumer choice probabilities of lady's underwear products from different COMs; the evaluation result reveals competitiveness of these COMs in Taiwan. Brand choice models are selected as analysis tool in this study, and seven countries of A1, A2, A3, A4, A5, E1, and E2 are selected for implementation based on an official statistic report. The results show that lady's underwear products from E2, E1, and A2 are the most popular ones in Taiwan, the choice probability values they obtained are 0.226, 0.224, and 0.174, accordingly. Furthermore, quality is the most important product attribute, COM, design, price go next, followed by awareness. This may provide manufacturers in these COMs relative information, and help promote competitiveness.