Refius Pradipta Setyanto succeeded to earn a doctoral degree from Management Study Programme, Faculty of Economics and Business Universitas Gadjah Mada. Refius who is a lecturer at Faculty of Economics and Business, Universitas Jenderal Soedirman, defended his dissertation in an open examination for Doctoral Programme which was held on Tuesday (9/1) at Auditorium of Faculty of Economics and Business UGM.
His dissertation entitled The Influence of Consumer Affinity and Consumer Animosity towards Price Evaluation on High and Low Involvement Products: Comparative Study in Indonesia and Malaysia. The research aimed to address the theoretical issue of the lack of explanation regarding the role of affinity and animosity. Both are emotional based conviction which is relatively stable when being faced with the change of information regarding the product’s price and country of origin.
Refius provided a new idea in explaining the conflict between rationality consideration and consumer affinity in evaluating the price of high and low involvement products. Refius said affinity only has meaning when it has high intensity and involvement in the product’s price evaluation. Based on the result of his research, the participants from Indonesia and Malaysia showed the same response where they tend to not become sensitive towards the change of product’s price.
On the other hand, Refius also said generally negative affinity or animosity shows the participants’ tendency to rate the product has been lowered and perceived to be cheaper than before. Refius said for Indonesian participants, the price reduction is positively perceived and the product’s price is deemed to be cheaper than before without considering its country of origin.
An opposite response was obtained from Malaysian participants who tend to not choose a product which comes from a low animosity country despite their high involvement.
“Therefore, we can conclude that animosity effect is not applied in Indonesia, while Malaysian shows the product connectivity with animosity because they still consider the information of the product’s country of origin,” said Refius.
The result of his research has a managerial relevance that can help the marketer comprehend the relation between the product’s country of origin and its price evaluation process. In addition, Refius’ dissertation also shows the decision making of international marketing without considering affinity factor can give bad impact towards the product’s competitiveness. “The essential practical implication of this study is the importance of label which contains information of the product’s country of origin which will be distributed to countries which have high affinity,” he added.