The country-of-origin affect on perception of services (PDF)

Master's Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: Sehr gut, The University of Surrey (School of Management), course: Business Administration, language: English, abstract: Today, the service sector contributes to a major part of the GDP of the most developed countries, while the share of services of the total export of these countries is comparable low. This constitutes certain challenges for the internationalisation of services. With regard to the use of "country-of-origin effects" (COO), the special service characteristics create challenges for service companies, e.g. by the inseparability of service provision and consumption. When decisions on the market entry options are made and local staff is favoured to expatriate staff, incongruence in the COO facets occurs which is difficult to hide. Based on the research on products, this might reduce COO's positive effects on service consumers' quality expectations (ESQ). In this context, the question arises whether information on training in the company's home country (CTI) can reduce the aforementioned negative effect.
In order to examine the existence of these relationships, an online provided self-administered experiment was created. Using a non-probability sample of 100 Germans, respondents were asked to rate two different service examples with regard to the ESQ. In each example, the country of the person providing the service (CPI) was manipulated to be congruent as well as incongruent to the company's origin. In addition, the CTI was added to incongruent service examples.