Country of origin effects

Often when we talk about branding, there is an innate concept that surfaces which is called the Country-of-origin(COO) effect. This simply means that the buyer's decision making process is biased based on the country of origin of the offering.  There may be many factors responsible for such associations of buyer s with a particular country some of which can be i) The ancient business of the nation (The watches in Switzerland)  ii) The Technological revolutions happened in the country(Japan and Germany). iii) The economy iv) The government
v) The wealth index(most important one).
This concept can be associated with many examples like the swiss watch or the scotch from Scotland or the French wines and list can go on and marketers implements this concept extensively to position their brands.

I am here to quote one such example where in COO effect could be seen operating as a success mantra for the offering.
It is still fresh in our hindsight, the 22nd feb,2009 when in the rampart of the 81st academy awards, the trumphets of Jai ho was blown and the son of BHARAT BHOOMI was awarded the oscar for the first time in musical category. Yes!!!!!! i am talking about the Slumdog millionaire, the movie that stole many awards in many events in that year and was one of the most successful movies ever made.
 But before getting carried away with the ecstacy, answer a question. How many of you have heard about a movie called Traffic signal. If we start digging from our memory, a wavy picture starts coming to our mind that we have heard about this movie somewhere. Let me reinforce your memory a bit. This was a movie by Madhur bhandarkar, released in the year March 2007. A movie that couldn't do wonders in the box-office but was made on the same lines as Slumdog exactly a year ago but we cannot say that theme was the same as we cannot challenge a hollywood movie's authenticity.
If you ask my point of view, i found Traffic signal a far better movie compared to slumdog but that's a different story.
However, the success of slumdog was surely due to one factor acting in several ways over the same movie:
- Poverty and India are siblings (atleast, the world perceives so) and the developed babus of the globe want to see our nation subdued, miserable, and poor despite the fact, that we are one of the fastest growing nations of the world. So, when we say that we are showing slums from India, the automatic thirst and passion operates over the world's most of the corners to see how subdued these dogs are & pamper themselves imagining their superiority. The poverty from India makes the global buyer's biased towards the offering as mentioned in the earlier part of the discussion. So did happen for slumdog. How convinced we Indians are with the fact that anytime we are shown subdued and caught in the spiral of social inequality, we are awarded oscars. It happened for Bandit queen and so happened for slumdog. However, when a movie like Lagaan, which shows Indians defeating the west, is not awarded anything even though it is best in the category.
Here, off course the Wealth effect accounts for the COO effect and it is a evident fact that our PPP says our poverty story.
Off course, Indians have gifted the world with many other gems apart from poverty but no one discusses about it that often.
Some of them are Ayurveda, Yog, Surgery(Father of surgery is susruta), kohinoor,Investment in gold (now called bullion) etc. But while availing these, does the buyers have a bias in their decision because of COO????
I have serious doubts. Forget about COO, Americans have even tried to infringe into our heritageous products like Basmati, Tulsi, Neem, & Turmeric and tried associating their country's name with it.
There are many unsung stories like this from India which is not associated with India anyways, but when it comes to poverty come what may, we stand to become the burning example of it.



So, i conclude the discussion saying that historic marketing concepts has evolved and the world uses it extensively also but what is dangerous is that the consumer tends to become more and more prejudiced in their decision making process as acceptability is something that the world need to learn to survive.