For Research : Attitude Toward Products

Different level technologies of the produced countries illustrate the different products quality, design, and value from consumer judgment. Consumers tend to show their attitude across the wide rang of the home country made products and they demonstrate their preferences on the products, which exists high quality, design, and value. This phenomenon may be also according to attitudes towards the people of the country, familiarity with the country (Nagashima, 1970; Wang & Lamb, 1980). Schooler (1971) and Wall and Heslop (1986) revealed that the consumers’ background including their demographic characteristics as well as culture characteristics (Tan & Farley, 1987) also played an important role in this phenomenon. From the perspective of developing nation, consumers demonstrate their attitude towards products from developed countries—technology more advanced (TMA)—to their homemade products, technology less advanced (TLA), which is reverse from consumer ethnocentrism concept (Barnabas & Jonathan, 1999). Patterson and Tai (1991) studied on the “Consumer Perceptions of Country of Origin in the Australian Apparel Industry” with the purpose of investigating consumers' perceptions of the quality of Australian products in general and consumers' attitudes toward Australian made versus imported apparel from major importing countries (New Zealand, the United Kingdom, China, and other Southeast Asian countries). This study used a randomly selected sample of the general adult population from the Wollongong region of New South Wales, Australia with 550 self-administered questionnaires. However, only 174 questionnaires were returned and used in the analysis. Respondents were asked to express their opinion toward the level of agreement on a 5-point Likert Scale with a series of questions about Australian-made products in general including past, present and future and its percentages of agreement results is shown Table 2-4) (Patterson and Tai, 1991). The result of their study indicated that consumer demonstrates their preferences toward the imported products from developed countries such as Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, but there was a negative side on imported products from China and other countries in Southeast Asia. Hussein (1997) conducted the research with examining the attitudes of Jordanian consumers towards imported products vs. domestic products by using t-test and one-way ANOVA to analyze the data. Following these statistical analyses, he concluded that Jordanian consumers addressed their attitudes towards foreign products to their domestic products.

The result is very similar to the result of Au and Sha (2003), which is diverse from the consumer ethnocentrism concept. This preference may be due to the historical, psychological and economic factors, poor marketing strategies, and poor government regulation and control as well (Agbonifoh, 1985). Consumers demonstrate their attitude towards the products from different countries unequally, firstly according to the differences in technology of the producers. Cordell (1992), Belk (1993), and Wang (1978) suggested that generally, consumers rate products from developing countries less favorably images. Table 2-5 shows the related literature finding on consumers’ attitudes.