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ABSTRACTIn international marketing, countries are often conceptualised as image constructs that have an influence on product image formation. Destination image and country of origin image are held to account for bias in consumer perceptions towards products because of the country from which they originate. Studies in these areas are typically underpinned by attitude‐based Likert or semantic differential scale methods, analysed using structural equation models. This paper achieves two key outcomes. Firstly, it adds to the small but growing body of literature that looks at the impact of tourism on post‐tour, export product evaluations. Secondly, it compares this traditional attitude‐based approach to country‐image studies with an alternative associative network theory approach, operationalised with a free‐choice, pick‐any survey method, which is popular within the branding literature. We compare the two methods by applying each to the same set of respondents to establish if the two methods are complementary, and find they produce different outcomes that could have critical implications for how country‐image studies are conceptualised and executed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.