Does Made-in-Italy still matter for Italian consumers?

The topic of country-of-origin effect (COO) gained the attention of marketing scholars in the early ‘60s (Schooler, 1965) and is well documented in the literature on consumer’s evaluation of products since the ’70 (Bilkey, Nes 1982). In recent years some authors (Pharr, 2005) have argued on the saliency of this concept in an era in which products and brands are progressively more global, and multinational corporations prefer not to emphasize the origin of goods since they routinely delocalize production in countries with weaker quality image. Moreover, nowadays many consumers seem to be unaware of the made-in of the products they buy and, if they are aware of it, merge these information with other clues as price, brand, point of sales. But a large body of research literature still deals with this topic (Usunier, 2006) and points out that, in addition to its role as a quality signal, COO has symbolic and emotional meaning to consumers, relating a product to national identity (Fournier, 1998). Although some studies explore the role of socio-demographics characteristics, like profession, on COO (Chao, Rajendran, 1993), most research uses convenience sample, often groups of students, to study the phenomenon. The aim of this paper is to present some results of an explorative research on the perception of Italian consumer of the concept of Made in Italy based on a more reliable sample: 800 individuals, representative of the Italian population, questioned through computer assisted telephone interviews (CATI).