Ideology of Origin Effect – a Conversion of the Country of Origin Effect

This paper is a follow-up of the first paper presented at Lumen 2014 conference on conversions entailed by the Europeanization concept in relation to the local adaptation versus standardization dilemma. It is our intention in this paper to focus on the ideology of origin effect, which resulted from the conceptual conversion of the country of origin effect from classical marketing. The conversion was part of our research dissertation on cognitive mapping of consonant and/or dissonant communicative contexts. We consider that this effect can be applied to the individual communicator, as the sender in an ideological communication process, by a complex recipient, such as the citizen(s) or the final beneficiaries of a policy, be they communities or individuals. The effect deals with ideas, beliefs, knowledge, judgements, emotions, social representations and conceptual networks, all deriving from what defines an ideology (Van Dijk, 2005). Being sharable, ideologies expose the social opinions of a group, which in turn cluster in a more familiar marketing notion, namely an attitude. Ideology can also be considered as a self-sufficient schemata of interpretation for the Us vs. Them representation as social groups.