The Impact of Brands on Consumer Buying Behavior

Abstract

The aim of this research is to understand the factors behind smartphone purchase decisions of consumers. Nowadays companies make use of various strategies in order to attract new customers, retain existing customers and differentiate their products from those of their competitors. Perhaps, the most important and effective strategy to influence consumer behavior in the product selection is emphasizing the “brand name” of the products. Our aim in this paper is to investigate how smartphone brands can influence consumers’ buying decisions. Brand equity is a set of brand assets and liabilities linked to a brand name and symbol, which add to or subtract from the value provided by a product or service. It enhances the customer’s ability to interpret and process information, improves confidence in the purchase decision and affects the quality of the user experience. Using this construct widely discussed in the literature, we use and build our hypothesis based on Aaker model about the brand equity, including perceived quality, brand awareness, brand association and brand loyalty. The study involved a questionnaire administered to 171 smartphone consumers between December 2015 and March 2016. The consumers were chosen by convenience sampling among the students from a prestigious university in the Istanbul district of Turkey. Our findings indicate that a majority of the smartphone buyers’ decisions are mainly influenced by brand loyalty and brand awareness. Perceived quality and brand association do not seem to influence purchase decisions for the sample of this study.