Is Familiarity a Moderator of Brand/Country Alliances?

Product and brand familiarity have an important role in consumer choice behaviour and they have been equated with knowledge and experience Consumers having high and low familiarity utilized brand information (an extrinsic cue) in their evaluations, whereas moderately familiar consumers used intrinsic cues (product attributes) in evaluating products. The question of whether familiarity moderates the country-of-origin (COO) effect is a valid one. In this present paper, we attempt to provide additional evidence as to how familiarity with products, brands and countries moderates consumer evaluation of brand/country alliances. Specifically, we concentrate on the brand leveraging process identified by Keller (2003) applied to the effect of familiarity on country/brand alliances.