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3 Methodology
3.1 Questionnaire design
The core part of this work is research of consumers’ attitudes based on the distribution of self-administered questionnaires. The questionnaire is designed as a structured questionnaire with 11 closed-ended questions, repeated for each of the four product categories concerned. For the sake of text conciseness and legibility, the four categories will be assigned shorter captions in the questionnaire and simplified one-word captions will be used in the text henceforth (as listed in Table 7).
Table 7 - Category captions
3.1.1 Product and brand familiarity
The product familiarity is researched in the context of previous purchase experience – the respondents are asked to indicate the frequency (or absence) of their purchase experience on a four-point scale.
Q1 – Have you in the past purchased a product of the following categories? (Never - Once - Seldom - Several times / Regularly)
In order to establish the respondents familiarity with the EU brands, five European brands, producing goods of each of the specific categories, will be offered and the respondents will be asked to choose the brands they are familiar with. This question is analogic to the way Schaefer (1997:15) researches the consumer familiarity with different beer brands among English consumers; it will be formulated as a five-element index and a numerical score will be calculated for each category, assigning one point for each option chosen or correct alternative option inputted by the respondent.HS code Product group name Questionnaire captions One-word caption
'8703 Cars (incl. station wagon) Cars Cars
'4202 Trunks, suit-cases,
camera cases, handbags etc., of leather, plastic, textile etc.
Suitcases, handbags, briefcases backpacks, camera/computer bags
Bags
'0406 Cheese and curd Cheese Cheese
'6403 Footwear, upper of leather Leather shoes Shoes
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Although this approach to the brand familiarity measurement is precedented in the literature, there seems to be little explanation offered on the choice of the specific brands and no statistical data on the producer-company level seem to be publicly accessible, therefore a pre-test was run, in which the respondents were offered 9 brands for the Cars and Bags categories and 14 for the Shoes category in an open-ended questionnaire. This pre-test gathered 14 responses (detailed results in Appendix 6) and five brands for each category were chosen based on three criteria (in this order):
1. The brands sample should represent as many countries as possible, therefore, only one brand of each country was chosen (where possible).
2. Priority was given to brands from the middle parts of the price spectrum, so as not to distort the measurement of the value perception variable and make the survey relatable to respondents with broad variety of backgrounds (therefore luxurious brands like the British Jaguar or German Mercedes-Benz were deliberately left out).
3. The brands with higher number of votes were chosen over brands with lower number (only brands with at least 1 vote were selected).
Q2 – Please choose which of the following EU brands you have heard of (not necessarily have purchased before)
Table 8 - Brands chosen for the brand familiarity testing
Cars Volvo Sweden
Volkswagen Germany
Land Rover United Kingdom
Škoda Czech Republic
Citroën France
Suitcases, handbags, briefcases backpacks, camera/computer bags
Kappa Italy
Rimowa Germany
Hama Germany
Delsey France
Hedgren Belgium
Leather shoes Tod's Italy
Ecco Denmark
Camper Spain
GEOX Italy
Baťa Czech Republic
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Cheese is a commodity, which is better identifiable by its type than the specific manufacturer brand (cheese and similar products are also often produced by small-size local producers) and in other research works, focusing on cheese and related products, like Krystallis & Chryssochoidis, (2006) the particular producer brands remain out of the scope of the research.
For these reasons the Cheese product category is left out from this question.
3.1.2 Country of origin image
The country of origin image is a complex, multi-faceted concept, examined differently in various research works – Roth & Romeo (1992:6) compare the dimensions of country of origin image as discussed in different studies and create the following overview:
Table 9 - COO image research overview
Study Country Image Dimensions Production & Marketing Image Dimensions
Nagashima (1977), (1970)
Price & Value, Service &
Engineering Advertising &
Reputation, Design & Style, Consumers' Profile
Innovation, Prestige, Design
White (1979) Expensive, Price, Technicality, Quality, Workmanship,
Inventiveness, Innovation, Selection, Serviceability, Advertising, Durability, Reliability, Brand recognition
Workmanship, Innovation, Prestige
Narayana (1981) Quality, Recognition, Prestige, Production, Form,
Expensiveness, Popularity, Functionality
Workmanship, Prestige, Innovation, Design
Cattin, Jolibert &
Lohnes (1982)
Pricing, Reliability,
Workmanship, Technicality, Performance
Workmanship, Innovation
Jaffe & Nebenzahl (1984)
Economy, Status Prestige
Han &
Source: Roth & Romeo (1992:6)
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In this overview, the most frequently quoted country-of-origin image dimensions are “Prestige”, “Innovation”, “Workmanship”, and “Design”, therefore these four elements will be taken as key aspects of the COO image and the respondents will be asked to choose, which of these aspects they view as the strongest advantage of the different EU-imported product categories.
Analogically to the previous question, a numeric score will be calculated, assigning one score point for each option chosen.
Q3 – Which of the following qualities do you perceive as the greatest advantage of products originating from EU? (Prestige,
Innovation, Workmanship, and Design)
Most of these criteria, except of prestige, cannot be applied to the Cheese category, therefore this category will have different set of properties for the respondents to choose from in a manner similar to the three other categories. Krystallis & Chryssochoidis (2006) use 32 questions to research the consumers’ evaluations of imported and domestic cheese, which can roughly be grouped to three categories by their topic: “Taste \ Consumption pleasure”, “Healthiness”, “High-quality ingredients” (see Appendix 5) – thus constructed general captions seem to represent well the universal characteristics of food products and therefore they will in turn be used as choice options for the evaluation of the Cheese category.
Q3b – Which of the following qualities do you perceive as the greatest advantages of products originating in EU? (Taste/Consumption pleasure, Healthiness, High-quality ingredients)
3.1.3 Quality perception
The quality perception variable will be researched directly by means of a semantic differential with seven values ranging from “very low”
to “very high”.
Q4 – How do you perceive the overall quality of EU-produced goods?
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3.1.4 Value perception
As mentioned before, the value variable will be examined in the context of a seven-point semantic differential of the consumers’ perception of the product pricing, ranging from “Very cheap” to “Highly luxurious”.
Q5 – Do you perceive the products of the following categories as cheap or luxurious?
3.1.5 Purchase intention
The potential purchase intention will be examined by means of two six-point semantic differentials – the first one will be enquiring about the presence of potential purchase intention in general, while the second will be asking specifically about the intention to purchase products originating in EU.
Q6 – In the future, will you likely purchase a product of one of the following categories?
Q7 – In the future, if you decide to purchase a product of the following categories, will you likely purchase product imported from
the EU?
3.1.6 Personal data
In order to balance and achieve equal representativeness of the samples, basic personal information about the respondents will be collected. This section is added to the end of the questionnaire, as suggested by Babbie (2013:266).
The respondents will be asked to indicate their belonging to one of the specific groups:
Q8 – Sex: Male, Female
Q9 – Age:
≦ 25, 26 - 35, 36 - 45, 46 - 55, 56 - 65, > 66Q10 – Income group (1000 NTD/month):
≦ 20, 21 - 40, 41 - 60, > 61Q11 – Education: Elementary, High School, College, Graduate
These groups are constructed in a manner similar to other studies of Taiwanese consumers’ preferences – Lin, Marshall, & Dawson (2009, p. 7) – with one more group added to the upper end of both the age and income scale in order to achieve better precision. Furthermore, education is added to ensure the variedness of the sample – the inclusion of education is common in similar research works (e.g. Josiassen, Lukas, and Whitwell 2008).