A large body of marketing research has examined how a product’s country of origin affects consumers’ perceptions of it. This phenomenon, known as the country of origin effect, differs across markets, products and industries. Morning Consult’s large volume of data on both brands and country favorability — key parts of our Brand and Political Intelligence products, respectively — allows us to expand our understanding of this effect in novel and exciting ways, with an eye toward generating concrete benefits for corporate decision-makers.
Introducing country affinity
In a new white paper released today, we leverage Morning Consult’s Brand and Political Intelligence data to introduce a novel, high-frequency country affinity metric that quantifies the closeness of the relationship between global consumers’ views of 46 major multinational brands and their countries of origin. Higher values indicate a stronger relationship.
Our ability to zoom in to the company level makes our country affinity metrics especially valuable for communications and marketing professionals and government affairs teams working to support the brands included in the study. It also holds value for brands beyond the immediate scope of the study that are similarly positioned by industry or relative to their peers.
The figure below provides an anonymized snapshot of the 46 brands included in the study, each of which is represented by a white dot. Blue bars represent industry-specific averages.
Just as companies’ country affinity scores are dispersed relatively widely across industries, so too are the industries themselves. Some industries — like social media and automotive — show strong average country affinity, while for others, the average relationship is weaker.
Country affinity is not inherently positive or negative: Strong affinity can yield reputational or material gains for brands when consumers hold positive views of their country of origin; it can also pose risks during geopolitical crises that cause those views to deteriorate sharply.
Understanding these dynamics at the brand and industry level gives brand stewards and executive decision-makers novel insight into how their brand is viewed around the world.
Brands included in the study can request a snapshot of how they are viewed in relation to their home country — and how they stack up relative to their competitors. Our companion white paper, which includes industry-specific breakouts, is intended to help interested parties whose brands are not included in the study approximate their own affinity scores and benchmark themselves.
Geopolitical crisis = brand crisis?
Our country affinity data has an additional application for crisis communicators: examining their brands’ exposure to consumer backlash during major geopolitical events that prime consumers to associate companies with particular countries.
For the purposes of our country affinity project, we used Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to model how a geopolitical shock affects a country’s reputation in a foreign market — in this case, Russian consumers’ views of the United States — and subsequently assessed shifts in favorability among American companies as a function of their country affinity. The metric was highly predictive of how much reputational damage U.S. brands suffered among Russian consumers in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, an analytical feat made possible by our Brand and Political Intelligence data.
As shown in the chart below, U.S. companies with stronger country affinity suffered greater fallout — measured as the percentage-point decline in net favorability among Russian consumers — than those with weaker affinity. Effect sizes are nontrivial and long-lasting, speaking to the damage that a geopolitical crisis can cause to companies in the strong affinity camp and the value of our data in helping to anticipate and plan for such shocks in the future. A global conflict over Taiwan is the most likely analogous event on the horizon that our data can help companies prepare for, but it’s far from the only use case, as we discuss further in our companion strategy playbook.
Knowing is half the battle
This memo and the white paper are geared toward helping corporate decision-makers understand where their brands stand today — and the risks and opportunities they face — in relation to their country affinity scores. The companion playbook offers a concrete, four-step road map to help them get their brands where they want them to go.
Learn more
Interested readers can access both the country affinity white paper and playbook exclusively via Morning Consult Pro (subscribe for access here) and learn more about Morning Consult Intelligence (which houses our Brand and Political Intelligence data) here. For client-, research- and press-related inquiries regarding the above materials, please contact [email protected].
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