Purchase Intention of American and Korean products: The Effect of Customer’s Nationalism, Attitude toward the Brand's Country of Origin

The key to the success of the marketing strategy lies in understanding consumer behavior, and this is important by decoding their behavioral intentions. In the same way, the factors influencing purchasing decisions are knowing consumer attitudes. Nationalism is one of the factors influencing consumer attitudes. The purpose of this research is to investigate the effect of customer's nationalism on the customers' attitude toward the brand origin and its effect on the intention to buy them by mediating role of brand attitudes. This study has the practical goal, and in terms of nature and method is correlative and the statistical population of this research were all citizens of Rasht city. The statistical sample included 389 questionnaires collected through the available method. Reliability of the questionnaire was verified using Cronbach's alpha and composite reliability. Validity of the questionnaire was also validated by content validity and with the help of professors and marketing experts. To test the hypotheses, correlation and structural equation modeling (SEM) based on partial least squares (PLS) approach were used. The results of this study showed that nationalism has a negative effect on attitude toward the country of origin, and with the increasing sense of nationalism in individuals, the attitude toward the US and South Korea was negative. On the other hand, according to the findings of this research, the attitude towards the country of origin has no direct and significant effect on the intention to purchase the products.