This paper integrates country-of-origin and global/local branding literatures to investigate how country-and brand-specific factors influence consumer preferences. Drawing from the stereotype content model (SCM) in social psychology, it operationalizes country perceptions by means of warmth and competence judgments and juxtaposes them with consumers' perceptions of brand globalness and localness to predict brand attitudes and subsequent purchase intentions. An empirical study involving a series of well-known brands from different countries and product categories shows that (a) the SCM can effectively capture country-of-origin effects, (b) judgments of competence impact consumer preferences above and beyond the positive effects of brand globalness and localness, and (c) country stereotypes (particularly the dimension of warmth) interact with perceptions of brand globalness in determining brand attitude, whereas perceived brand localness has an independent effect. Theoretical and managerial implications of the findings are discussed and directions for future research identified.

Drawing on the Stereotype Content Model (SCM), we investigate the impact of both explicit and implicit country stereotypes on consumer preferences. In Study 1, we show that the competence dimension of the SCM (measured both explicitly and implicitly) drives purchase intention by positively influencing brand affect. In Study 2, we disentangle further the role of explicit and implicit stereotypes and show that explicit judgments of country competence are better predictors of deliberate consumer choices, whereas implicit judgments of country warmth dominate spontaneous choice. Managerially our findings indicate that sole reliance on explicit stereotypes may result in an incomplete picture of consumers' responses to country-of-origin cues.

Purpose – This paper aims to review the notion of schemata in consumer behavior, placing particular emphasis on the conceptualization of brand knowledge, and illustrate how schema theory may act as a unifying conceptual framework to study what consumers know about products and brands. Extant research on how consumers conceptualize brands lacks a single, coherent theoretical framework. The literature is fragmented into different approaches that may prevent comparisons across studies and make it difficult to draw conclusive results. Design/methodology/approach – The paper discusses the central tenets of schema theory and then presents the structure of schematic knowledge and the main typology of consumer schemata. It focuses on the brand schema, delineating its internal properties and drawing analogies with other approaches used to describe consumers’ mental representation of brands. Findings – Schema theory can provide a comprehensive framework to analyze how consumers perceive brand information. A cognitive schema specifies the parameters of knowledge content, discriminates between different types of information and indicates how various pieces of information relate to one another. Importantly, the internal structure of schemata remains stable across conceptual domains, allowing to investigate brand-specific knowledge in different contexts and in conjunction with superordinate and subordinate knowledge structures. Originality/value – This is the first systematic review of the notion of schemata in consumer behavior. It thoroughly describes how schema theory from psychology has been applied in marketing research to describe the organization of market knowledge and illustrates how it may function as an analytical tool.

Purpose The dominant paradigm in international branding research treats perceived brand globalness (PBG) and localness (PBL) as attributes algebraically participating in brand assessment and disregards the perception of brands as humanlike entities actively embedded in consumers’ social environments. Challenging this view and drawing from stereotype theory, the purpose of this paper is to suggest that PBG/PBL trigger the categorization of products under the superordinate mental categories of global/local brands which carry distinct stereotypical content. Such content transfers to every individual product for which category membership is established and shapes brand responses. Design/methodology/approach One experimental study (Study1, n=134) tests the process of global/local brand stereotype formation, identification and content transfer. Subsequently, two consumer surveys test the impact of brand stereotypes on brand approach/avoidance tendencies (Study2, n=328) and consumer–brand relationships (Study3, n=273). Data were analyzed with experimental techniques and structural equation modeling. Findings The findings suggest that upon categorization under the global or local brand class, individual brands are charged with the stereotypical content of the class. Global brands are predominantly stereotyped as competent while local brands are predominantly stereotyped as warm. Localness-induced warmth has uniformly positive effects, whereas globalness-induced competence acts as a double-edged sword which can both help and harm the brand. Originality/value This research contributes by proposing a novel conceptualization of global and local brands as groups of intentional marketplace agents stereotyped along their intentions and abilities, empirically establishing the process through which individual brands are assigned stereotypical judgments and demonstrating how these judgments impact critical brand outcomes and consumer–brand relationships.