The effect of Country of Design and Country of Manufacturing on Perceived Product Quality: Empirical Study on UHT Milk Product

The product quality is often considered as the main focus of the marketing strategy. Marketers often face problems related to consumer subjective assessment of quality of a product that indicated by intrinsic and extrinsic clues. Extrinsic characteristics are more commonly used in assessing the quality of consumer products because it is easier, for example country of origin. The objective of this research to examine the country of origin as a multidimensional construct that are country of design and country of origin manufacturing on product perceived quality. The product category was used in this study is UHT milk. This research was conducted with laboratory experimental design using 2×2 factorial design. The results showed that country of design was not supported to affect perceived product quality mean score was 3.4121 and 3.4167 as the effect from high and low country of design, respectively, with significance value of 0.969. However, high country of manufacturing affected stronger to perceived product quality compared to the low country of manufacturing, with significance value of 0.033 and the mean score of perceived product quality were 3.5287 and 3.2843 for the effect on both high and low country of manufacturing