Evaluation of foreign products in the context of South-North geographic cues

The quality perceptions of imported goods create advantages and disadvantages for exporting countries. This conceptual paper examines how economic stereotypes about South and North in addition to country-specific stereotypes affect consumers' product evaluations. Similar to country-specific stereotypes, stereotypes about different regions within one country (e.g., Hollywood) and different groups of countries (e.g., EU) also affect consumers' product evaluations. We go one step further and propose that South and North geographic cues may become strong factors when made salient during foreign product evaluations. Specifically, we propose that consumers' stereotypes about the North as a more industrialised region may favourably affect their evaluations of technical products. Alternatively, consumers' stereotypes about the South as a traditionally agricultural region may favourably affect their product evaluations of food products. In some situations, however, the proposed effect may be too weak to override the country-of-origin effect.