The country of origin effect (COE) has been a central topic in scholarly international marketing literature for over half a century, but the concept seems to have stubbornly resisted all attempts at providing an encompassing account of how it comes to affect consumers in practice. Through an approach which treats COE as a perceptual phenomenon that is contingent on various psychological mechanisms this conceptual work revisits some three central theoretical issues of COE research and attempt to ferret out tentative means of addressing some of these long lived problems that have been identified in the literature to date.

• Mikael Andéhn(Aalto University School of Business, Finland)
• Alexei Gloukhovtsev(Aalto University School of Business, Finland)
• John Schouten(Aalto University School of Business, Finland)