EFFECT OF RELATIONSHIP MARKETING COMPONENTS ON THE CONSUMER BASED BRAND EQUITY: A RESEARCH IN THE FURNITURE SECTOR

Year 2020, Issue: 83, 647 - 672, 30.09.2020

Tuğba Yeğin Ahmet Gürbüz

Abstract

In a competitive environment, the desire of businesses to earn huge profits with little expense leads businesses to gain strong brands. The products or services offered by businesses with strong brands to the market are preferred by consumers, even if they are expensive compared to other products or services that have the same or similar characteristics in many ways. One of the main challenges of the marketing world is to create emotions in consumers in different segments and turn this emotion into purchasing. Brand equity; It is the most valuable fundamental building block that makes a brand strong. The marketing world, which focuses on brand equity, has provided a new approach to marketing since the late 1990s. One of these marketing concepts is relationship marketing, the subject of the study. Relationship marketing includes a perspective of consumer-based brand equity. In the study, it is aimed to find out the relationship between the values of brands using relationship marketing applications that appeal to the branded national and international market in the furniture sector and to reveal what the results are. In this context, in this study, the relationships between relationship marketing and consumerbased brand equity for certain brands operating in the furniture industry are analyzed with the structural equation modeling approach. The study is conducted with 639 participants. In the analysis of the study; the structural equation modeling method is used. The findings of the study show that when international furniture brands strengthen their relationship marketing practices and dimensions, they increase consumer-based brand equities. Among the relationship marketing dimensions, respectively; It has been concluded that trust, loyalty, and communication have an effect on consumer-based brand equities, whereas shared value and empathy, also among the relationship marketing dimensions, have no effect on consumer-based brand equity dimensions. This work is important in terms of eliminating the lack of relationship marketing and consumer-based brand equity issues in the literature and supporting those who want to work on this issue later.

Keywords

Marketing, Relationship Marketing, Branding, Brand Equity, Consumer- Based Brand Value.

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