Valentyna Melnyk, Kristina Klein,& Franziska Völckner

The Double-Edged Sword of Foreign Brand Names for Companies from Emerging CountriesForeign branding—or using brand names that evoke foreign associations through, for example, spelling a brand name in a foreign language—is a popular means in both developed and emerging countries of suggesting a specific country of origin (COO) in the hope that it will evoke certain product qualities. As a result, consumers increasingly encounter products with brand names that imply a COO that differs from the actual COO (where the product is manufactured). In four experiments, the authors find support for the hypothesis that incongruence between the actual COO and implied COO decreases purchase likelihood asymmetrically. Incongruence backfires in hedonic categories but has hardly any effect in utilitarian categories. Furthermore, incongruence decreases purchase likelihood more if the actual COO is an emerging rather than developed country. The authors address the psychological process underlying the asymmetric effect of incongruence by showing that consumers apply different information-processing strategies to hedonic versus utilitarian products. These results have important implications for (fweign) branding decisions. Keywords, foreign branding, international marketing, emerging economies, brand management

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hoosing a brand name is fundamentally important for companies (Aaker 1996; Keller, Heckler, and Houston 1998; Keller and Lehmann 2006). A strategy that an increasing number of companies worldwide have adopted uses foreign brand names—that is,"spelling or pronouncing a brand name in a foreign language" (Leclerc, Schmitt, and Dubé 1994, p. 263). Foreign branding implies a specific country of origin (COO) in an effort to build or enhance perceptions of certain product attributes. For example, Häagen-Dazs, an American ice cream brand, implies a Scandinavian origin, and Storck, a German confectionary producer, gave French names to its products Merci and Chocolat Pavot. Similarly, a Japanese fashion designer, Issey Miyake, gives French names to his perfumes (e.g., L'Eau Bleu, La Crème de L'Eau) presumably to highlight their hedonic elegance and temptation properties through automatic references to French perfume brands.

Valentyna Melnyk is Senior Lecturer in Marketing (Assistant Professor), Waikato Management School, University of Waikato (e-mail: vmelnyk§ waikato.ac.nz). Kristina Klein is a doctoral student (e-mail: k.klein@wiso. uni-koeln.de), and Franziska Völckner is Professor of Marketing and Management (e-mail: voelckneriwiso.uni-koeln.de). Department for Marketing and Brand Management, University of Cologne. The authors thank Henrik Sattler, Harald van Heerde, Stijn van Osselaer, and Anirban Mukhopadhyay for their helpful comments on previous versions of this article. The authors are also grateful for the constructive feedback received during presentations of this research at the Globa

l Brand Management Conference at Koç University, the Marketing Science Conference in Cologne, and the European Marketing Academy Conference in Kopenhagen. The authors thank Philip Demmler for his help in collecting the data for Study 3. They also gratefully acknowledge the helpful and constructive comments and suggestions of the three anonymous JM reviewers. Sanjay Sood served as area editor for this article.

The Renkus-Heinz American loudspeaker company uses German language associations presumably to enhance perceptions of their products' reliability. However, foreign branding is not limited to companies from developed economies. Firms from emerging countries increasingly market their own brands domestically and internationally with the ambition of positioning them as global brands (Brown 2005). Yet many of them use foreign brand names in the hope that foreign (mostly Western) appeal will induce higher quality perceptions and greater social status for their brands (Zhou, Yang, and Hui 2010). For example, several Korean firms have assigned French brand names to their cosmetic lines (e.g., Laneige and Mamonde[by Amorepasific], Luichel[by Hanbul Cosmetics Co. Ltd]). Two leading Chinese appliance brands, Haier and Galanz, use more Germanic brand names, perhaps to enhance the utilitarian associations, such as durability and quality, often assigned to German appliances. Consumers thus encounter products that carry a foreign brand name that implies a particular, often developed, COO while the"made in" label (actual COO) reveals that the product was manufactured in an emerging country. Do such strategies work? What happens when consumers read the actual"made in" information? According to Miller (2011), approximately one-quarter of consumers make purchase decisions on the basis of COO information. Anecdotal evidence consistently illustrates that companies strongly believe that consumers pay attention to"made in" labels (i.e., the actual COO) and their congruence with the foreign brand names when making purchase decisions. For example, in the fashion industry, Chinese firms began to manufacture in Italy simply to ensure that they could use theJournal of Marketing Voiume 76 (November 2012), 21-37

® 2012, American Marketing Association ISSN: 0022-2429 (print), 1547-7185 (eiectronic)

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"Made in Italy" label to enhance favorable COO associations (Donadio 2010). Prior research has also demonstrated the ability of"made in" labels to create differential advantage (Sheth 2011). Therefore, understanding consumers' reactions to the (in)congruence between the COO implied by the brand name and the product's actual COO is of crucial importance for branding decisions. Academic literature has established that consumers use COO as an extrinsic cue to evaluate products (for reviews, see Agrawal and Kamakura 1999; Verlegh and …… 此处隐藏：92188字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……