Abstract: Previous research on country-of-origin effects has examined the composition of product–country images, and how consumers use country of origin as a cue for determining product quality. While considerable research in marketing has shown that country of origin has a great impact on product evaluations and sometimes it would bias consumer’ product beliefs, less work has focused on how products, especially for those coming from countries with a perceived lower quality, can counteract these effects. Our study addresses this issue and provides managers with a proactive, tangible way of reducing the COO effects. COO can be viewed as a stereotype, which consumers use as a shortcut when evaluating products. Theories about stereotype argue that humans tend to reason following two processing styles: heuristic system that is quick, intuitive and effortless and analytic process which is slow, analytical, and deliberate that occasionally corrects the output of automatic process. Researches suggest that automatic process results in stereotypic thoughts being more accessible in memory. Thus the activation of the analytic process is a possible means to reduce COO effects. Yet to date, how to activate the analytic process to counter the COO effects has been neglected in marketing. We propose that the specific kinds of presentation of products information, which may cause information disfluency, can activate the analytic process in order to reduce the COO effects through reducing the intuitive confidence. Note that not all kinds of presentation of product information can reduce the COO effects; even those which bring a large amount of information disfluency to consumers. As information disfluency increases, the cognitive loads, which hinder the activation of analytic process, also increase.
To examine the hypotheses, three studies were designed. In study2 and 3, 2 (country of origin: high and low) × 2 (presentation of product information: easy and difficult) between – subject design were adopted. A total of 308 undergraduate students participated in the experiments. CRT test was used to test the activation of analytic process.
Trough ANOVA analysis, the first study showed the activation of analytic process contributed in reducing COO. In study 2 and 3, the first and the second experiments suggested that certain presentation of products information reduced COO effects through activating the analytic process. In contrast to past studies, the third experiment suggested that not all kinds of presentation of products information had such reducing effect. Moreover, if the presentation was too complicated, it could not reduce the COO effects for the large amount of cognitive load.
The results showed that COO effects can be reduced by the activation of analytic process. Further, our research showed how the presentation of product information can help reduce the COO effects. In addition, although prior research has suggested that there is positive connection between the information disfluency and the activation of analytic process, our research is the first to show that this positive connection dose not always exist. The activation of analytic process could be weakened when there is too much information disfluency.

Key words: country of origin image, dual-process, the presentation of products information, metacognition, cognitive load