THE EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION FOR COUNTRY OF MANUFACTURE EFFECT ON CARS’ BRAND

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 distinguished upon involvement level segmentation. This is
an experimental design study with Cluster Analysis to classify consumer involvement level
and the main method is MANOVA. The study investigated the impact of longitudinal
experimental set of field treatments on participant brand personality who are the owners’ two
consimilar cars: Toyota cars made in Indonesia; and cars originally imported from Japan. The
findings of this research indicate that Country of Brand and Country of Manufacturing with
clusters of consumer’s involvement level basis have various effects 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 showed more influences to the enduring and situational involved
level consumers cluster, in the contrary, the response of involved consumers level cluster tend
to think otherwise.