The effect of the country of origin and the country of manufacture on the purchasing tendencies of consumers

In today's world, with the effect of the globalization, consumers can easily access to products which are produced all around the world. For this reason, firms also carry out their production facilities at various places of the world, to maintain their competitive advantages and minimize their costs. However, there are various factors which affect consumers' attitudes and preferences on buying a product. One product's information of the country of origin and the information of where the product was produced are two specific factors which affect consumers' attitudes on purchasing among (above mentioned) factors. On this study, the country of origin effect's impact on consumers' purchasing preferences has been investigated. 100 students from Başkent University have been applied a semantic differentiation scale on whether they are going to buy the car which was produced in country of origin or the same car which was produced in another production country when they are going to buy a car and the result is that participants stated at high rates that they are going to prefer the car that is produced at the country of origin. At the second part of the research section, a qualitative study about determining the reasons for these preferences of the participants via using the sentence completion technique that is among the primary data collection techniques, has been implemented. As a result, with quantitative and qualitative studies that are implemented on the research, the subject of the research which is the effect of the image of the country of origin, is positively and meaningfully influential on consumers' purchasing attitudes and preferences, has been observed. Keywords Country of Origin, Country Image, Country of Manufacture