KOREASCHOLAR

This paper analyses consumers’ perception of the country image of Italy across 7 emerging countries: Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Russia, South Africa, and Turkey. Drawing from the international marketing and tourism literature (De Nisco, Papadopoulos and Heslop, 2017; Roth and Diamantopoulos, 2009), 4 main structural dimensions of the Italian country image were chosen as focus of investigation: general country image, product-country image, tourism destination image and cultural heritage image. The empirical research was based on a survey conducted on a sample of 4,550 respondents intercepted through an online panel. Two preliminary exploratory factor analysis (EFA) were ran to refine the scales and to summarize the data into structural factors. The first EFAs grouped measurement scales in 7 components: tourism destination image; general country image; product country image; product accessibility; evaluation of hedonic products; evaluation of utilitarian products; and evaluation of Italy as a tourism destination. The second EFA identified 3 distinct components of the cultural heritage image construct, i) art, literature, history, movies, ii) sociality, cooking, handcrafts and iii) traditions, expression, celebrations. Using the dimensions resulting from the EFA as data input, a latent class analysis was then employed. A 4-cluster solution emerged and the four segments reveal how the general country, product, tourism and cultural heritage components of place image are related and of how they jointly affect consumers’ intentions. Moreover, the study provides additional evidence of country of origin effects from the perspective of consumers from emerging markets, where both the

• Alessandro De Nisco(Università degli Studi Internazionali, Italy)
• Maria Rosaria Napolitano(Università degli Studi Internazionali, Italy)
• Michela C. Mason(Università degli Studi di Udine, Italy)
• Giampaolo Viglia(Portsmouth Business School, UK)