Considering the number of universities and the size of the young population targeted for higher education in Turkey, there is an urgent need for further research studies on university branding efforts. The aim of this exploratory research study is to explore specific factors/criteria that Turkish students consider during the process of selecting a graduate degree program at a university in the USA and to contribute to the limited research in the area of university branding. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), which is a structured technique for analyzing complex, multi-criteria decisions, has been used for this research. Surveys were applied to students in order to discover specific factors/criteria that Turkish students employ during the process of selecting a graduate degree program at a university in the USA. In this study, there are many decision-criterias that need to be taken into consideration and each criterion must be analyzed with respect to a specific university. The in-depth interviews with professors/education counselors, student survey applications, and the analysis of previous stream of related research has led to identification of criterias to be used in the study. Following the pairwise comparisons, a survey has been designed to assess the relative superiority of the 12-criteria in the model. The most prominent criteria during the process of selecting a graduate degree program was reported as “Post Graduation Job and Career Prospects”. The findings of this study can be used to support those who have the intention to develop a successful university brand.

Over the last decades, companies have significantly increased their investments in the creation and development of brands. The brand creates value for both the consumers and the company. Consumers brand associations are a key element in brand management. Managers are interested in both the intensity and the strength of brand associations. This paper studies whether different types of brand associations have an impact on the purchasing decisions of consumers. This study was carried out at six of the biggest shopping malls in Ankara, Turkey with the participation of 601 consumers between the ages of 15-35.

This study builds from LeClerc et al.'s (1989LeClerc et al.'s ( , 1994 work on foreign branding effects, but it does so in the context of a developing East European country; as in the case of Turkey. The purpose of this exploratory research is to examine consumers' attitudes towards products with foreign brand names and also to assess the impact of foreign brand names on the purchasing decision making. In the data collection phase of the study an in-depth interviews were conducted with 23 participants in the city of Ankara, Turkey. The results show that products with foreign brand names elicit more positive consumer attitude than products with national brands. Overall, the findings suggest that consumers prefer to purchase products with foreign brand names for a variety of reasons which including quality, reliability, functionality and prestige. The results have important implications for domestic and foreign manufacturers with regards to the consumer-side effects of their decisions on branding strategies and on their competitive foreign branding decisions.

In this paper, we try to determine whether loyalty cards issued by stores have an impact on customer loyalty and how loyalty cards compare with other factors companies can use to increase loyalty in general. Based on the results of the study, it is concluded that loyalty cards have no impact on customerss store loyalty. On the contrary, it is observed that customers that use their loyalty cards frequently tend to shop at different stores with different loyalty cards.

Consumers in developing countries