As wine consumption in Europe declines, Asia is picking up the baton and in particular, Chinese consumers are importing a growing volume of wines from around the world, but little is known about how country of origin influences their decisions.
This is the research gap recently addressed by Ms Yichen Zhou and Professor Lisa Gao of the School of Hotel and Tourism Management (SHTM) at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU). Their large-scale questionnaire study reveals how country-of-origin information interacts with Chinese consumers’ perception of brand image and wine quality to influence purchase intention, providing invaluable insights for marketers.
As a drink with a history dating back to antiquity, wine is freighted with various meanings and connotations in consumers’ minds. All food and beverage products have social implications beyond their utilitarian function, but this is especially so for wine, the classic accompaniment to high living and an item that in China must necessarily be imported. “As wine is gradually becoming a symbol of sophistication and growing wealth,” say the researchers, “it becomes increasingly appealing to [Chinese] consumers”.
While China is a vast market, surprisingly little research has investigated the factors that influence Chinese consumers’ decision making around imported wine purchases. “Chinese consumers have diverse backgrounds and segmentations”, write the authors, “making their perceptions and preferences valuable in guiding product development and marketing initiatives”. As China is also one of the world’s fastest-growing wine markets, there is an urgent industry need for an in-depth study of the considerations that shape individual consumers’ eventual choices.
Traditionally, wine in China may have been best understood as a luxury good. “Chinese wine consumers tend to favour imported wines for gift-giving purposes”, the researchers report, “as these wines symbolize premium quality and prestigious social status”. However, this trend appears to be shifting, as consumers may be becoming more price-sensitive. Marketers should therefore be aware of both the prestige value of foreign wine as a wealth signal and the appeal of specific brands to consumers who assess a price–quality trade-off.
As wine evolves from status symbol into well-appreciated culinary product in China, the marketing role of its country of origin (COO) becomes more complex. Yet “while COO plays a major role in Chinese consumers’ wine purchases”, the authors note, “there is little previous research into the marketing of COO images for wine in developing markets”. We still know little about the specific importance of wine brands in China – in contrast with countries with a long-established dominance in the global wine trade, such as France.
Advertising the COO of a product activates a set of specific connotations in the consumer’s mind, summarised by the researchers as “a psychological network of cognitive and affective connections associated with a particular country”. These country-related attributes range from politics, culture and economy to language and even people. Collectively, the effect of learning a product’s COO is to induce a set of expectations of the product’s intrinsic attributes and overall quality, based on beliefs about that country’s level of development.
These associations and their effects on purchase intention are summarised by the stereotype content model (SCM). Wine purchasing decisions have been described as “complex and difficult”, reflecting the numerous variables involved – style, year, terroir and so on. Hence, in the absence of other guidance, consumers may rely on positive stereotypes of a wine’s COO to reduce the risk of a poor decision. This is known as the “halo effect”. The researchers thus settled on the SCM as a suitable theoretical framework for investigating COO effects in China’s imported-wine market.
To analyse the influence of perceived COO on Chinese consumers’ wine purchase intentions, the researchers focused on two aspects of country-level stereotyping: warmth and competence. “Consumers’ perceptions of a country’s warmth”, they explain, “are defined as the degree to which a country is perceived as kind, warm, friendly and cooperative”. Stereotypes of competence, meanwhile, denote that a country is seen as capable and effective due to its technological, economic and political development, implying that its export products are of reliably high quality and safety.
The researchers thus hypothesised that the perceived warmth and competence of a COO would influence consumers’ perception of quality and, in turn, their purchase intention. To test this, based on the SCM, they selected Germany as a typical “high-competence, low-warmth” country and Greece as a country of low competence but high warmth. A sample of 298 Chinese consumers – with various levels of self-reported wine knowledge – then answered a survey exploring how their perceptions of the warmth and competence of a wine COO related to the wine brand’s perceived warmth and competence, and thence to its perceived quality and their willingness to purchase it.
Analysis of the survey results validated all the researchers’ hypotheses. Perceptions of high COO competence fed through to perceptions of high competence of wine brands from that COO. Brand competence was in turn associated with perceived quality, and higher quality led to greater purchase intention. Warmth played a similar role, with a significant sequential association from perceived COO warmth to brand warmth to brand quality to purchase intention. This is not merely an abstract finding, as the surveys also confirmed that Germany was perceived as more competent and Greece as warmer.
These findings represent a novel insight into the value of country image in marketing wine imports in China. To gain market share, wine importers need to optimise the segmentation and positioning of wine in the evolving and increasingly brand-driven Chinese market. The researchers argue that “foreign companies operating in new world wine countries such as China can achieve this by developing communication strategies that emphasize the positive image of their COO and the wine brand”.
Moreover, the implications of the study extend beyond wine retailers themselves. In countries and regions known for their wine production, tourism destination marketers could capitalise on their reputation for warmth and/or competence, setting up an association between these perceived qualities and local wine products to entice travellers. Winery tourism is an established trend, and it could be strengthened by marketing that emphasises the unique landscapes and winemaking traditions of places as diverse as France, the US, Australia and Argentina.
At the individual firm level, the authors advise that “hospitality businesses such as restaurants, hotels and resorts can leverage the COO’s image to enhance their wine programs and culinary offerings”. The importance of COO image in wine appreciation also has implications for distributors’ online strategy. Social media, for example, offer an array of opportunities to not only market products directly but also educate Chinese consumers about wine through narratives that link positive COO stereotypes with engaging information about the people and processes behind winemaking.
Wine, a complex product steeped in tradition and prestige, is already big business in China, but it has considerable potential to grow further. With major producers around the world competing for a slice of the Chinese market, Zhou and Gao’s study will be invaluable for marketers. Based on their findings, we can expect to see Chinese consumers increasingly using COO information to help them navigate the complexities of choosing wine, while distributors may use messaging around the positive attributes of COOs as the core of their strategies to communicate with specific market segments.
Yichen Zhou and Lisa Gao (2024). The Influence of Perceived Country of Origin Image on Chinese Consumers’ Purchase Intention of Imported Wine. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Vol. 36, No. 8, 2870–2886.
Press contact: Ms Tiffany Chan, Marketing Manager, School of Hotel and Tourism Management
tiffany-sm.chan@polyu.edu.hk / https://www.polyu.edu.hk/shtm
