Lúcia de Fátima Martins Guilhoto (Insper Instituto de Ensino e Pesquisa)
Within the new global configuration of businesses it can be observed that the international offer of services is a phenomenon in wide expansion. Currently, the service sector is the largest element in virtually all advanced countries and in most less developed nations. Despite the growing importance of the service sector in both emerging and mature markets and the unique challenges facing multinational service providers, research in international services marketing did not increased in proportion to its relative importance. Additionally, it can be observed that even if the research on the Country of Origin effects is extensive on the manufacturing sector a very limited number of studies addressing the COO effects on the perceived quality of services were developed so far and all of them use this construct as a one-dimensional concept. The primary purpose of this paper is twofold: 1. to present a completely new framework to investigate in a fine grained way how the Country of Origin construct acts on the service sector, breaking this construct in three sub-dimensions: Country of origin of service’s know-how (COK), which refers to the country where the service is firstly conceived and where all the training processes and procedures to be applied in other countries are developed; Country of origin of personnel (COP), which refers to the origin of people offering the service; and, Country of origin of service-specific tangibles (COT), which refers to the origin of the tangibles used to offer a certain service; and, 2. to further reinforce how these sub-dimensions would influence, individually and together, the perception of quality of a service. In order to achieve this purpose, based on a rigorous and extensive literature review a set of hypotheses was developed to verify our multi-dimensional approach. Our original framework with the COO sub-dimensions was empirically tested with four experiments and a survey specially designed for this research. Data were gathered from 718 Brazilian students in three different Universities located in two different States in Brazil. The results obtained indicate that COO can significantly affect consumers’ evaluation of perceived service quality and that this construct can and should be segmented in different sub-dimensions, since we have indeed verified clear effects of all sub-dimensions. COK, COP and COT each individually influenced the perceptions of quality. This new framework would allow both a more detailed approach to the COO construct and also a more manageable way to deal with this cue in different studies. This paper has the potential to contribute, then, to at least three important marketing research streams namely international marketing, consumer behavior and services marketing.
Data: 29 de maio de 2013 (quarta-feira)
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