Produkto kilmės šalies ir šalies įvaizdžio įtaka marketingo strategijai

This topic was chosen for analysis due to its increasing importance for today’s international business development. Recent phenomenon of intensive product design and manufacture outsourcing to less developed countries causing ambiguity in product’s country-of-origin, raised new concerns about practical country-of-origin and country image applications in marketing strategy. Many products and brands can no longer be associated with only one country of origin, but rather a range of countries where the products were developed, designed and produced. For this reason companies tend to ignore the fact that consumers still pay a lot of attention on evaluating the products quality according product’s country-of-origin and still desire to purchase products from specific countries, while products from countries with unfavorable image are associated with perceived risk.

Problem of the paper: Are COO and country image factors always of significant importance on marketing strategy?

Object of the paper: Lithuanian consumer perceptions towards COO and country image.

Goal of the paper: to describe the impact of country-of-origin and country image concepts on marketing strategy.

Objectives:

To describe what is country-of-origin and country image disclosing how it affects consumer perceptions and buying behavior.

To examine what positive or negative affects country-of-origin and country image can have on products and describe what actions can be taken in order to strengthen those positive effects and weaken the negative ones.

To make a survey in order to find out the trends on how country-of-origin affects consumers in Lithuanian market.

To analyze the results of the research and evaluate how different consumers in Lithuania, according to their age, gender, income, education and other demographic criteria are affected by country-of-origin effect and how consumers buying decisions vary depending on the type of product they are buying.