Conceptualizing Country-of-Origin Image as a Country-Specific Advantage: An Insider Perspective

This study proposes a new approach to the Country-of-Origin Image (COI) literature. Unlike previous research which gathers COI from an outsider (external) perspective, it argues that the COI phenomenon should be understood from insider (internal) perspective, that is how national stakeholders within the home country perceive COI. Measuring the image of a country from the insider perspective can help its national stakeholders recognize COI as a valuable resource that can be translated into a Country-Specific Advantages (CSA). It thus introduces the construct ‘Country Self-image’ (CSI) that covers an insider perspective and identifies it as an antecedent of COI based CSA (COI-CSA). It adapts and validates a scale of CSI to this effect and test the relationship between CSI and COI-CSA by performing a structural equation modeling (SEM) on a dataset collected from two different surveys. The adapted scale of CSI comprises six dimensions and twenty-three items.