Creating Lines to Land: The Country-of-Origin Effect from a Sustainability Communication Perspective

Over the past decade, sustainability has received rising attention in politics, the business world and throughout other societal systems. Much more, today, sustainability-related policies and regulations standardize sustainability-related behavior and sustainability communication across all sectors. The emerging field of sustainability communication seeks to understand all areas of promotional culture, from public relations to marketing. However, while strategic communication of and about sustainability predominantly focuses on corporate reporting, marketing studies deal with green marketing (and related ‘washing’)—both fields without acknowledging cultural and local impacts on and in strategic sustainability communication. At the intersection between PR and marketing, the study at hand investigates customer perceptions of products related to specific locations. The country-of-origin theory states that the image people have about a certain country might affect their behavior and attitude toward products from that country and their perception of how ‘sustainable’ the product is. With a concrete case, delving into the perception and evaluation of Austrian white wine among customers in Sweden, the country-of-origin effect is explored in regard to its potential in sustainability marketing. The chapter also offers a country-of-origin-related example for creating local proximity and ideas for future strategic sustainability communication that takes strategies to create cultural and social local/regional proximity into account.