Promoting The Country of Origin Through the Assets of Exported Services: The Moroccan Case

Banking services are one of the main Moroccan exports in Africa. These representations can be studied in order to verify the reversed country of origin effect. Can these services impact the way their users perceive the country? Do they even communicate on their origin or does their process focus on the economical variables only? These questions nurture the scientific research.

The Impact of Mortality Salience on Purchase Intention and Creativity Evaluation on Products During COVID-19 Pandemic

In the environment of COVID-19, people are faced with mortality salience (MS) and socioeconomic crisis. According to the terror management theory, the MS would lead to particular consumption attitudes and behaviors caused by the self-esteem and cultural worldview defense. The creativity as a potential value of products needs to be examined to explore how the MS changed the creativity evaluation of three types of products categorized into normal, renovative, and innovative products, based on the degree of originality (Zhang et al., 2019). Two experiments were conducted to examine (1) the MS effect on the creativity and purchase intention evaluation and (2) both MS and country-of-origin effect on the evaluations. The results show that usefulness and purchase intention are affected by both effects, and the novelty is mainly affected by MS.

Polarizing influence of power distance on country of origin effect

PurposeCountry of origin (COO) effect refers to the influence of COO on consumers' perception and evaluation of a product. This research explores the impact of consumers' power distance on COO effect.Design/methodology/approachWe conducted two experiments to test the relevant hypotheses.FindingsThe results indicate that power distance has a polarizing influence on COO effect. That means, for products from countries with good images, the higher the consumers' power distance, the better their evaluation of the products; while for products from countries with poor images, the higher the power distance, the worse their evaluation of the products. The research also finds the moderating effect of consumers' competence–related country-related affect (CRA). When holding positive competence–related CRA, for products from countries with good images, the higher the consumers' power distance, the better their evaluation of the products; for products from countries with poor images, consumers' power distance has no effect. When having negative competence–related CRA, for products from countries with poor images, the higher the consumers' power distance, the worse their evaluation of the products; for products from countries with good images, power distance has no effect.Originality/valueThis study finds that depending on the perception of COO image, power distance not only improves the evaluation of products but also lows such evaluation, reflecting a two-way polarizing feature.

Lack of parent-of-origin effects in Nasonia jewel wasp: A replication and extension study

In diploid cells, the paternal and maternal alleles are, on average, equally expressed. There are exceptions from this: a small number of genes express the maternal or paternal allele copy exclusively. This phenomenon, known as genomic imprinting, is common among eutherian mammals and some plant species; however, genomic imprinting in species with haplodiploid sex determination is not well characterized. Previous work reported no parent-of-origin effects in the hybrids of closely related haplodiploid Nasonia vitripennis and Nasonia giraulti jewel wasps, suggesting a lack of epigenetic reprogramming during embryogenesis in these species. Here, we replicate the gene expression dataset and observations using different individuals and sequencing technology, as well as reproduce these findings using the previously published RNA sequence data following our data analysis strategy. The major difference from the previous dataset is that they used an introgression strain as one of the parents and we found several loci that resisted introgression in that strain. Our results from both datasets demonstrate a species-of-origin effect, rather than a parent-of-origin effect. We present a reproducible workflow that others may use for replicating the results. Overall, we reproduced the original report of no parent-of-origin effects in the haplodiploid Nasonia using the original data with our new processing and analysis pipeline and replicated these results with our newly generated data.

The Impact of Customer Education on the Perception of Made in Italy Products in the Agri-Food Sector

While the global COVID-19 pandemic affected all the industries, the Italian agri-food sector positively performed over this period, supported by the exports, underlining the need for new international strategies to authentically engage consumers. This study aims to investigate the impact of customer education (CE) on the perceptions and evaluations of foreign consumers towards Made in Italy products as a part of the food experience in the agri-food sector. After a literature review, the paper illustrates the main topics of customer education, food experience and country-of-origin (COO) effect of Made in Italy. The purposes of the conceptual paper relate to the strategic use of country-of-origin effect by companies in order to promote products and services in foreign markets, and to the analysis of the impact of customer education within the food sector on the perception of Made in Italy products taking into account the new challenges of the current situation.