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

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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.
6 
1. Conceptual development and definitional issues of the country-of-
origin construct 
 
Over the course of time, academic literature has proposed various definitions of the country-
of-origin concept, but, to date, a univocally accepted conceptualization has not yet been reached. 
Among the most widely accepted proposals, Ahmed and d’Astous (1996) defined COO as “the 
country where corporate headquarters of the product or brand is situated; also it can be inferred 
from the country of assembly or manufacture, and the country of product design” (Ahmed et al., 
1996). Indeed, nowadays the accuracy of the definition of country-of-origin can be quite blurred 
given the astonishing growth of multinational companies and the evolution of hybrid products, with 
components from many source countries and different brand origins and design locations (Al-Sulaiti 
et al., 1998). For this reason, as Papadopoulos also claimed in his book "Product-Country Images: 
Impact and Role in International Marketing" (1993), it is no longer possible to talk about a single 
place of origin for today’s products and services as it would be a narrow and misleading definition; 
on the contrary, it is now appropriate to refer to the broader concept of “partitioned country-of-
origin”, which includes such declinations as “country-of-brand”, “country-of-design”, “country-of-
manufacture”, “country-of-assembly” and “country-of-parts”, which assume a specific relevance in 
the modern globalized marketplace. 
Dinnie (2003) analyzed the country-of-origin phenomenon and proposed a temporal 
evolution pattern relative to the development of the concept from the beginnings of this line of 
research up to the 2000s. In his work, the author identified three main periods in the chronological 
development of the country-of-origin research (Dinnie, 2003). The first phase covered the period 
from 1965, that is the year in which the author traced the first publication on the topic of COO, until 
1982 and witnessed the exploitation of simple single cue studies. Towards the end of this phase, 
which was characterized by the use of country-of-origin information as the only product cue to be 
manipulated, there has been a shift to more complex investigation methodologies, including those 
about the generalizability of country-of-origin effects. The second period includes those studies 
published between 1983 and 1992, which were significantly more than those considered in the 
previous phase given the growing interest that the country-of-origin phenomenon was attracting 
among academic researchers; moreover, in this period some authors started arguing that previous 
works may have overstated the relative importance of country-of-origin effects, particularly where 
a multi-attribute approach was not used, hypothesizing that other product cues such as price and
7 
quality may have a stronger effect on consumer product evaluations than country-of-origin 
information if only they were included in the investigations (Dinnie, 2003). Finally, the third phase 
in the development of the COO concept and research covered the period from 1993 to the 2000s; 
it showed a shift of academic interest from the central subject of the effects of the country-of-origin 
to a variety of lines of research which tried to decline the COO with respect to constructs such as 
brand origin, consumer ethnocentrism and product-country image. Furthermore, from the end of 
the 1990s the service sector started receiving a growing attention thanks to the recognition that 
post-industrial economies are dominated more by services than by tangible products from an 
economic point of view; this relatively new field is facing unprecedented change and globalization 
is one of the main drivers of these transformations, thus it is appropriate to believe that country-of-
origin effects are assuming increasing relevance also in the service sector (Dinnie, 2003). 
Dinnie (2003) provided a detailed analysis of the individual phases identified in his literature 
review, highlighting the issues of greatest relevance and the continuous development of the 
concept of COO during the investigated timeframe. As far as the period from 1965 to 1982 is 
concerned, the author asserted that early studies in the country-of-origin field tended to adopt what 
would now be regarded as a rather simplistic approach in their investigations; indeed, most of them 
embraced single-cue methodologies, i.e. those where COO is the only product information to be 
included and manipulated, which could have inflated the impact of country-of-origin on consumers’ 
evaluation of products. However, during the evolution of this stream of research, a trend towards 
more complex investigations of country-of-origin effects have been observed, identifying the COO 
as one product cue amongst many, for example price, brand name and quality, to name a few. This 
first period in the country-of-origin field was also characterized by some interesting initial 
perspectives into the phenomenon, beyond establishing the existence of the country-of-origin 
effect itself; in particular, some authors started examining the issue of labelling and the related 
“made-in” product image and country image, also with a focus on the distinction between national 
and regional labelling. The author also delineated that one of the weaknesses of such early studies 
is the lack of focus on what would later become conceptualized as product-country image (Dinnie, 
2003). 
The following period, lasting from 1983 to 1992, has seen the development of the country-
of-origin research, together with a proliferation of different multi-attribute approaches in the 
assessment of its effects over consumer behavior. As Dinnie (2003) assessed, academics have shown 
a growing interest in the examination of the link between the image of a country and the image of
8 
products made in that country, as well as in the comparison of images of domestic versus foreign 
products. Continuing the tendency observed in the 1965-1982 period, there was also an accelerating 
trend towards the use of multi-cue approaches in assessing country-of-origin effects; this led to 
discovering that COO as a product attribute could actually be less significant than had previously 
been believed (Dinnie, 2003). Moreover, this evolutionary phase has seen an attempt to deepen the 
understanding of the concept of country image, distinguishing between its two dimensions, namely 
the halo construct and the summary construct. One of the main weaknesses that the country-of-
origin research presented during this period was the lack of focus on the service sector, with an 
almost exclusive attention to tangible products. 
The last phase went on from 1993 up to the present years and has been characterized by the 
attempt to reconceptualize the country-of-origin construct, with a growing number of studies 
investigating various aspects of the topic. In particular, the concept of product-country image (PCI) 
has been introduced in order to account for the multidimensional character of the images of 
products and brands on the one hand and for the multiple places potentially involved in a global 
production system on the other (Dinnie, 2003); from that moment, academics began theorizing the 
possibility that a product (or service) could not have a single country-of-origin, but a plurality of 
them (for design, manufacturing, branding, assembling and parts procurement). Furthermore, the 
relationship between brand popularity and country image has been examined in terms of marketing 
effectiveness, as well as the influence of national stereotypes on advertising information (Dinnie, 
2003). The new concept of brand origin has been introduced in this period, which refers to “the 
place, region or country to which the brand is perceived to belong by its target consumers”, as 
defined by Thakor and Kohli (1996); it has been described as a distinct concept from existing ones 
such as country-of-origin, but clarifying that origin information is often already embedded in many 
well-known brand names, so that the effects of the COO cue could not always be completely 
overcome (Dinnie, 2003). Moreover, academics started investigating the notions of consumer 
ethnocentrism and need-for-cognition, both deeply related to the psychological process that 
precedes consumers’ behavior. Only recently, researchers have included the service field into their 
investigations with respect to the country-of-origin domain, although its relevance to national 
economies has been assessed many decades ago. 
Table 1 presents a schematic summary on the evolution of the country-of-origin concept as 
illustrated by Dinnie (2003).
9 
Table 1 – Summary scheme on the evolution of the COO concept based on Dinnie (2003) 
 1965-1982 1983-1992 1993-2000s 
Investigation 
approach 
Single-cue 
methodology 
Multiple-cue 
methodology 
Multiple-cue 
methodology 
Research focus 
Only tangible goods Only tangible goods Both goods and 
services 
Main research 
themes 
Existence of the COO 
effect; 
Regional vs. national 
labelling; 
Country image as a 
dynamic concept; 
Country-product link 
Image of domestic vs. 
foreign products; 
Country image as a 
halo or summary 
construct; 
Influence of gender on 
COO perceptions; 
Product category-
country image match 
Product-country image; 
Multiple origins; 
Brand popularity and 
country image; 
National stereotype 
and advertising; 
COO in services; 
Brand origin; 
Ethnocentrism; 
Need-for-cognition 
Source 1 - Own elaboration 
 
2. Methodology 
 
In this chapter, the goal is to try to perform a systematic literature review of articles and 
other works published from 1978 to October 2019 to extend prior existing reviews that studied the 
phenomenon of the country-of-origin, with its antecedents and outcomes, from a variety of points 
of view. This chapter also aims at conveying a better understanding of the evolution of the concept 
of country-of-origin, together with its several dimensions (i.e., country-of-manufacture, country-of-
design, country-of-assembly, country-of-brand and country-of-parts). Table 2 illustrates, in 
chronological order, previous literature reviews on this topic considered for the purposes of the 
present work; they have been selected through a focused research on two online databases, namely 
Scopus and Google Scholar, using the labels "country of origin" (also considering its hyphenated 
version, i.e. “country-of-origin”) and "literature review" as keywords (they had to be both present 
in the title of the reference). Of 31 total results obtained by the two abovementioned sources, only 
those literature reviews which presented a broader scope were taken into consideration (4), while
10 
the great majority of them were found to have an excessive sectoral focus or to be not pertinent to 
the marketing and international business field (27). 
 
Table 2 - Previous literature reviews on COO 
Authors Main contents 
Al-Sulaiti, K. I. et al. (1998) Comprehensive review of the literature regarding the effect of 
country of origin on consumer perceptions of products and services, 
where particular attention is given to quantitative studies carried 
out on the topic. Most of the references on the subject is covered in 
order to be eligible as a fully comprehensive research. It is organized 
chronologically and thematically. The period covered is from 1965 
to early 1997 and the addressed themes include the evaluation of 
products, stereotyping, the effects of demographics on consumers’ 
perceptions of imports, perceived risk and COO effects on service 
decisions. 
Dinnie, K. (2003) Overall literature review about the conceptual development of the 
country-of-origin construct. Three main periods in the chronological 
development of the country-of-origin research are identified during 
the timespan from 1965 to 2004, in particular 1965-1982, 1983-
1992 and 1993-2004. These are characterized by different focal 
themes of the COO’s streams of research. 
Saran, R. et al. (2012) Extensive literature review of the concept of country of origin from 
a marketing perspective. A holistic approach has been adopted to 
try to draw a relationship between COO and Brand Origin (BO) and 
to understand the related attributes of the COO, considering its role 
in purchase decision making. 
Durand, A. (2016) Integrative literature review relative to the phenomenon of the 
country-of-origin effect (COE), developed using online databases, 
bibliography management software, and literature-mapping 
techniques. 355 papers are analyzed and the nomological network
11 
of the COE is drawn to establish links between the phenomenon, its 
antecedents and its outcomes. No time restriction is set. 
Source 2 - Own elaboration 
 
2.1. Search process 
 
The search criteria encompassed articles investigating the COO published in leading journals 
in the marketing and international business fields. 
Initially, no restriction was set with respect to the type of material under study; thus, 
conceptual as well as empirical papers, book chapters and conference proceedings published until 
October 2019 (included) were considered for the present review. Later, it was decided to limit the 
research to papers available in the sector’s leading journals, given the huge number of results 
obtained without the above restriction. Both electronic means and manual search have been 
exploited for the selection of references. 
As a first step of this methodological process, a preliminary search in Scopus has been 
conducted, using “Country of origin”, “Country of design”, “Country of manufacture”, “Country of 
assembly”, “Country of brand” and “Country of parts”, as well as the same labels, but hyphenated 
(e.g., “Country-of-origin”), as keywords; the reason behind this choice lies in the growing relevance 
of the concept of hybrid products in a globalized world where it is no longer permissible to consider 
a single country-of-origin for products and services, but it is necessary to take into consideration all 
the various facets of this now blurred concept. Through a series of experimental researches whose 
queries used different combinations of the abovementioned keywords, it has been found that both 
the use of capitalization and hyphenation did not alter the overall search process; indeed, the 
selected online database provided the same amount of results for labels with or without capital 
letters and punctuation. Thus, the labels without hyphenation and capitalization have been chosen 
for the search query. 
Originally, the Scopus search provided 2112 results which included at least one of the 
keywords explicated above in the abstract section, in the title or keywords; those references were 
published in different journals of various research fields, as well as in books and conference 
proceedings. Specifically, as much as 2097 of them contained the “country of origin” label, whereas 
only 56 results included “country of manufacture” in the investigated sections (while 42 results were 
obtained for “country of design”, 30 results for “country of assembly”, 28 results for “country of 
brand” and 13 results for “country of parts”). Furthermore, the first publication to report the label
12 
“country of origin” in the abovementioned sections was issued in 1973, but when the research was 
refined to include only those papers published within the “Business, Management and Accounting” 
subject area, the first pertinent article dated back to 1978 (1991 for “country of manufacture”, 
“country of design” and “country of assembly”; 1997 for “country of brand”; and 1998 for “country 
of parts”). 
Given the great amount of references obtained with the final search query, it has been 
decided to refine and reduce the database of material in order to conduct a more accurate thematic 
analysis, as previously mentioned. This has been done by limiting the search to references published 
in journals with rating higher than or equal to 3 according to the official list of Association Business 
Schools (ABS) classified in the fields of “Marketing” and “International Business and Area Studies” 
(United Kingdom, 2018). In addition, other four journal sources were included which belong to the 
ABS Academic Journal Guide 2018 in the field of “General Management, Ethics, Gender and Social 
Responsibility” with a rating equal to 4*: Academy of Management Journal, Academy of 
Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly and Journal of Management. They were 
included in order to account for leading journals in the general management research area, but the 
final output confirmed that none of them included articles quoting the selected keywords pertaining 
to the topic of the present review. Journals listed in all the other fields of the ABS Academic Journal 
Guide 2018 were not considered due to specific research scope of this work. 
Therefore, in order to be included in the present review, the selected reference had to: (1) 
cite the abovementioned keywords in the abstract, title or keywords; and (2) be published in one of 
the specific journal sources described above. Using these two search criteria, a final output of 294 
references was obtained. After reading of abstracts, 71 references were excluded due to not 
relevance with the subject under study (off-topic); thus, the final dataset included 223 articles 
published in 20 leading journals referring to the COO and its dimensions, as shown in Table 3. 
 
Table 3 - Description of the number of articles published in each journal, with journal ranking and main field 
Publication name N. Journal ranking 
(ABS Academic Journal Guide 2018) 
Main field 
(ABS Academic Journal Guide 2018) 
International Marketing 
Review 
91 3 Marketing 
International Business 
Review 
20 3 Intern. Bus. and Area St.
13 
Journal of International 
Marketing 
17 3 Marketing 
Journal of International 
Business Studies 
16 4* Intern. Bus. and Area St. 
European Journal of 
Marketing 
16 3 Marketing 
Journal of the Academy of 
Marketing Science 
8 4* Marketing 
Industrial Marketing 
Management 
8 3 Marketing 
Marketing Letters 7 3 Marketing 
International Journal of 
Research in Marketing 
6 4 Marketing 
Psychology and Marketing 6 3 Marketing 
Journal of Consumer 
Research 
5 4* Marketing 
Journal of Retailing 5 4 Marketing 
Journal of Consumer 
Psychology 
4 4* Marketing 
Journal of Marketing 
Research 
4 4* Marketing 
Journal of Advertising 3 3 Marketing 
Journal of International 
Management 
2 3 Intern. Bus. and Area St. 
Management International 
Review 
2 3 Intern. Bus. and Area St. 
Marketing Science 1 4* Marketing 
Journal of Marketing 1 4* Marketing 
Journal of World Business 1 4 Intern. Bus. and Area St. 
Total 223  
 
Source 3 - Own elaboration
14 
2.2. Steps for the thematic analysis 
 
As a first step, an Excel workbook was created in order to organize data for the subsequent 
thematic analysis. Each article was provided with a protocol (ID) number and was analyzed to collect 
the following data: authors, title, year of publication, journal source, citation (with volume, issue 
and pages) and journal ranking according to the ABS Academic Journal Guide 2018. In addition, in a 
following step, the abstract and keywords of each article were extrapolated. This organization of 
data allowed the comparison of references according to the specific purposes of the present work. 
Subsequently, a first exploratory analysis has been carried out aimed at understanding 
whether it was possible to use one of the methodologies already tested in the previous literature 
reviews related to the country-of-origin field (see Table 2) in order to implement a thematic analysis 
of the material collected in the present study. To this end, a cross-analysis of contents was 
performed considering both the approaches adopted in the previous reviews and the abstracts of 
the references forming the current dataset. Among the available methodologies, the one presented 
by Durand (2016) had been found to have the highest degree of complementarity with the present 
review, as discussed above; thus, it was embraced to carry out the thematic organization and 
analysis of the selected material. 
Durand (2016) proposed a methodological approach to conduct an integrative literature 
review about the country-of-origin effect (COE) phenomenon, which can however be applied to any 
other academic research context given the high degree of generalizability of the guidelines that the 
author outlined. Integrative literature reviews often include an element of visual representation of 
the material under study in order to identify themes and patterns in the area of research; this visual 
summary is usually called “literature map” or “nomological network” and is built through literature-
mapping techniques (Durand, 2016). 
Figure 1 illustrates a synthetic overview of the nomological network about the COE proposed 
by Durand (2016). According to the author, the COE phenomenon occurs through the recognition 
(accurate or not) of the country-of-origin; indeed, the COE is a totally subjective attitude, while the 
COO is an objective location. Despite being objective, an important feature of the COO is that it can 
be multiple. Specifically, offerings may have multiple origins depending on the various national 
locations of design, manufacturing, assembly, and so on. With respect to the outcomes portion of 
the nomological network, the literature has extensively investigated the influence of COE on 
consumer behavior and, to a lesser extent, on organizational behavior. The COE has also been
15 
analyzed for its impact on overall success measures for organizations (e.g. brand equity, 
performance) and countries (e.g. economic growth), directly or indirectly through behaviors. As for 
antecedents and moderators, the political, economic, sociocultural and technological (PEST) context 
of a given country plays a central role. Indeed, it influences two powerful antecedents: country 
image and information display. Finally, several moderators, which have been grouped under the 
label of “knowledge-related moderators”, intervene directly in the attitude formation towards a 
country of origin or indirectly through origin recognition and image formation. Moreover, the COE 
has proved to be a dynamic phenomenon. Therefore, the success or lack thereof resulting from a 
positive or negative COE leads to changes in the economic, socio-cultural and technological 
conditions present in a given country, which in turn can influence the political, institutional, legal, 
regulative and administrative arenas. In short, the level of success changes over time a country’s 
political, economic, socio-cultural and technological (PEST) environment and can also cause 
alterations to the country image and other antecedent variables (Durand, 2016). 
 
Figure 1 - Nomological network of the COE as proposed by Durand (2016) 
 
Source 4 - Durand (2016)
16 
Since a rather articulated literature was considered in the present work, the nomological 
network proposed by Durand (2016) immediately seemed to be the most suitable methodology to 
organize references in a linear and coherent structure. Furthermore, one of the guidelines that 
drove this thematic analysis from the very beginning was the idea of classifying data into mutually 
exclusive categories in order to simplify the review and keep it straightforward. Hence, the literature 
map explained above proved to be an adequate logical way to organize and compare data. 
As a result, selected references have been classified into three macro-categories, as 
illustrated by Durand (2016): (1) studies about antecedents and moderators of the country-of-origin 
effect, (2) studies on the COE phenomenon itself, and (3) studies related to the various outcomes 
of COE. Subsequently, through the analysis of abstracts and keywords, material was assigned to the 
different thematic groups suggested by Durand (2016) within each macro-category, under the 
condition of mutually exclusive classes. 
The main reason why Durand's work and the present study have obtained completely 
different results that cannot be superimposed or placed side by side in terms of analyzed papers, 
even if they are based on the same methodological classification, consists in the use of different 
sources to extrapolate the material under study; in particular, Durand (2016) relied on two selected 
online databases, namely ProQuest/ABI Inform and EBSCO/Academic Search Complete, while for 
the purposes of this literature review, the material was acquired from the Scopus online database 
only. Furthermore, despite the weight of this difference in the procedure cannot be ascertained 
given the diversity of sources, the keywords employed in the research protocols also differed 
between the two studies: indeed, while this work considered “country of origin”, “country of 
brand”, “country of design”, “country of manufacture”, “country of assembly” and “country of 
parts” as keywords, as well as their hyphenated variants, Durand's research started using a single 
keyword, "country of origin" and hyphenated, and then built more advanced queries that were 
evaluated one by one based on the relevance of the obtained results. 
 
3. Findings 
 
3.1. State of the Art 
 
The first consideration concerning the database under study relates to the fact that there 
has undoubtedly been a growing academic interest in the COO over time, as can be seen in Figure
17 
2. The amount of references ranges from a minimum of 1 paper per year in 1978, 1980, 1984, 1985 
and 1988 to the highest value of 26 references in 2017. Some years have even recorded a total 
absence of publications on the topic of COO, but only before the 2000s. As illustrated in Figure 2, 
the various dimensions that constitute the concept of country-of-origin in modern interpretations, 
namely country-of-manufacture, country-of-design, country-of-assembly, country-of-brand and 
country-of-parts, began to appear in the academic literature at different points in time. In particular, 
the first publication to introduce the constructs of COM, COD and COA dates back to 1991, while 
COB was conceptualized only in 1997 and COP in 1998. Therefore, before the 1990s no distinction 
was made with respect to these components of the COO notion in the academic literature. 
 
Figure 2 - Number of papers on COO per year 
 
Source 5 - Own elaboration 
 
Most of the material has been published in the International Marketing Review (91), which 
accounts on its own 40,8% of the analyzed literature. Other noteworthy journal sources are the 
International Business Review (20), Journal of International Marketing (17), Journal of International 
Business Studies (16) and European Journal of Marketing (16), which all together represent 30,9% 
of the references presented in the database. Figure 3 illustrates the distribution of papers according 
to journal sources in the database.