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The effects of acculturation and assimilation are significant parts of consumer research. However, a void exists in cross-cultural research with a near-absence of assimilation studies involving country-of-origin (CO) images. The current study fills this void by examining the extent of assimilation of host country CO stereotypes. CO stereotypes are examined for immigrants, first generation and more rooted citizens. The results of confirmatory factor analysis of CO perceptions regarding two different products from two different source countries endorse the potential value of assimilation/acculturation as a segmentation dimension. Our findings also indicate that the assimilation process is more gradual than can be expected based on the melting-pot theory.

Managing service operations has continued to assume greater importance in most developed economies. This is in view of the ubiquity of service organizations and operations, the associated large workforce, and the substantial contribution of the service sector to the gross domestic product of most of these countries. In order to be successful, it is extremely important for service managers to be able to appraise their activities over time by using pertinent information derived from their customers. This paper demonstrates the use of the importance‐performance analysis framework to assist management of a campus food service organization to improve its services. It also studies the relative effects of implicit and explicit weighting methods on importance ranking as well as the grid‐classification of service quality attributes. Furthermore, analysis of the factor structure of the attributes indicates, like some other reported studies, that the five‐dimensional factor structure postulated for services in the literature was not confirmed for the campus food service scenario studied.