The Impact of Brand Awareness and Country of Origin in the Advertising Effectiveness of Greek Food Products in the United Kingdom: The Case of Greek Yogurt.

The present study aims to investigate the country-of-origin effect and the branding process on the brand equity of Greek yogurt abroad, specifically in the United Kingdom. The research was carried out as a 2 × 2 experiment using a closed-ended questionnaire with the participation of a total of 400 consumers, using two Greek yogurts (branded and non-branded) as the product under study, with or without country-of-origin insignia (viz. the Greek flag) on the packaging. According to the research results, brand equity was found to be higher for the branded Greek yogurt with country-of-origin insignia among the four product categories, as reflected in its three sub-dimensions (brand awareness, loyalty, and perceived quality). It was also found that country of origin influences brand equity regardless of branding, a finding that confirms the significant effect of this factor on consumers' perceptions. This highlights the distinction between perceived quality and the specific image of the country in terms of its production experience for a specific product category. Based on these findings, Greek yogurt companies exporting abroad should lay great emphasis on developing branding strategies to strengthen their product brand, while at the same time incorporate country of origin as an indicator of the quality of their brand. The latter finding applies in particular to less well-known brands, since geographical indication (insignia) or other strategies that promote the country of origin are perceived as important informational cues for consumers.

Visual metaphors in food advertising: A cross-cultural study.

Even though, to date, numerous studies in food advertising have considered the use of visual metaphors, their impact on consumers' responses in diverse cultures has been only narrowly investigated. The present study scrutinizes the conditional indirect effect of visual metaphors on the moderated by culture attitude toward the ad and the resulting attitude toward the brand. Two 2 × 2 full factorial between-subjects experiments with two levels of visual metaphor (presence and absence) and two levels of culture (India and the USA) were used to test our hypotheses. Participants, 417 (207 Indian, 210 US) for the first experiment and 181 (82 Indian, 99 US) for the second experiment were divided in four treatment groups (one for each condition). Two versions of two print advertisements for a novel coffee and a novel ice-cream brand were the experimental stimuli in experiments 1 and 2 respectively. SPSS macro (PROCESS tool) was used for data analysis. Both experiments provided evidence in support of the proposed framework. Visual metaphors in high context cultures (India) seem to have a significantly more positive effect on attitude toward the ad and eventually on attitude toward the brand compared to low context environments (USA).