The Country-of-Origin in the Luxury Furniture Industry: A Comparison Between “Made in Italy” and “Made in Portugal”

5 1 COUNTRY-OF-ORIGIN: A LITERATURE REVIEW The country-of-origin represents a significant research topic for marketing and international business scholars and has attracted growing attention over the last decades due to the overwhelming evolution of globalization and all the phenomena it gives rise to. The objective of this chapter is to introduce and contextualize the concept of country-of-origin, as it is the most important theoretical construct of the present work, through a review of the extant literature on the subject. In the first paragraph, a general overview about the conceptual development of the country-of-origin phenomenon is presented based on the literature review issued by Dinnie (2003). This work was chosen from all the existing literature reviews on the subject, because it offers a general and concise overview on the conceptual development of the COO theme over time; on the contrary, other reviews limited their focus to a specific thematic area, such as the brand origin in the work issued by Saran and Gupta (2012), or to a particular kind of studies, as did Al-Sulaiti and Baker (1998) focusing only on the quantitative experiments carried out on the topic of the country- of-origin. Afterwards, the methodological procedure adopted in the present chapter is outlined in detail through the second paragraph, including the description of the overall search process and the steps undertaken for the thematic analysis of the selected literature. The third paragraph fully delineates the results of this study, with a focus on the most investigated countries, and then adopting the approach proposed by Durand (2016) to conduct an in-depth thematic analysis of the papers in the dataset. The choice of adopting this approach to classify and present the references was dictated by the fact that the conceptual structure proposed by the author allows a straightforward application to the database of this study, given its linearity and the concreteness of the employed categories. The same paragraph subsequently introduces a preliminary analysis centered on the international communication of brands, which will be further investigated in the second chapter of the present work. Finally, the conclusive paragraph completes the chapter with a discussion about the outcomes of the study and clarifying which proved to be the most consolidated lines of research and the emerging issues in the context of the country-of-origin; it also sets the starting point for the next chapter.