Abstract:
Sri Lanka is emerging as service sector driven economy with the GDP penetration of 50%-60% from service sector.
After imposing the open economy policy in 1977, local brands had to gear ahead with intensive competition came from
international brands. Telecommunication industry of Sri Lanka has been dominated by international brands, but local brands
are strategically promoting the concept of country of origin (CO) or being local as a motive for citizens to deliberately
purchase locally originated brands. In this context researchers viewed this branding practice, and selected 200 respondents
from four geographical areas under the stratified probability sampling method to investigate the effect of country of origin in
terms of brand performance. Both descriptive and inferential statistical analysis executed by PCA (principal component
analysis) factor analysis accompanied with testing two hypotheses revealed that Country of Origin (CO) or promoting as being
local had impacted less significantly on brand awareness and recalled power development of telecommunication brands
against the competitive foreign brands. However, it has a significant impact on brand recalling power.