The Influence Of Consumer Perception

Perception is the process through which we recognize, organize and interpret stimuli into a meaningful and logical picture of the world. Consumer perceptions play an important role in determining their buying behavior and product choice. For this reason it has been very important for scholars to gain insight into consumer perception since time immemorial. In simple terms perception is an image that one has in mind about a product or a brand. Companies endeavor to their best to present a favorable perception of their brand in the minds of consumer.

Josiassen and Harzing, ( 2008) argued that consumer perception toward countries, cultures and their products tend to change over time therefore it has been of great interest to consumer behavior researchers and international business over years.

Several researches have been conducted across the globe to study perception across different cultures, different products and different countries.

People from different cultures and different environments tend to perceive

(Damanpour, 1993; Dickerson, 1982; Eliott and Cameron, 1994; Morganosky and Lazarde, 1987, Patterson and Tai, 1991) while the opposite case holds true for consumers in developing countries (Agbonifoh and Elimimian, 1999; Batra, Alden, Steenkamp and Ramachander 2000; Bow and Ford, 1993; Sklair, 1994; Wang et al., 2000).

Some authors have shown that brands perceived as coming from a non local country of origin, especially from Western countries were preferred to brands seen as local and that was not only linked to perceived quality but also to social status (Batra et al., 2000).Country of origin effect plays an important role too. For example people will go for a Swiss chocolate rather than a Russian one because of the country of origin effect. Thus a brand’s country of origin serves as a “quality halo” of the product (cf. Han,