Browsing by Author "Merdin-Uygur, E."

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Citation - Scopus: 2
Consumer-Brand Relationships in Turkey
(Emerald Group Publishing Ltd., 2018) Merdin-Uygur, E.; Kubat, U.; Gürhan-Canli, Z.
Marketing academics and practitioners have acknowledged that consumers form specific relationships with brands that are able to create unique and memorable qualities. As a result, the concept of consumer-brand relationship has been of great interest for marketers. Indeed, consumer-brand relationships are very complex and multidimensional in nature. A common perception is that brand management should create ultimate offerings and communication to have successful relationships with its consumer base. However, how consumers construe their relationships with brands is mostly out of the brands' control. It is an emotion-intense realm and necessitates careful study of the consumers as well as the context. After summarising the current literature on brand relationships, we focus on Turkish consumers' relationships with brands. By focussing on a range of global and local brand studies, this chapter offers a comprehensive and well-informed analysis of the issues and practices involved in consumer-brand relationships in the Turkish context. The chapter is organised into three parts. The first part focusses on antecedents of consumer-brand relationships such as the global or local identity of the brand and brand personality. The second part presents detailed explorations of various brand relationships such as brand love and brand trust. The third and the final part focusses on an important phenomenon, the stage for various brand relationships, being online brand communities. The chapter concludes with the future research directions in these three main areas together with a discussion of offline and online branding opportunities in the Turkish market. © 2018 by Emerald Publishing Limited. All rights reserved.
Experience Consumption in Turkey
(Emerald Group Publishing Ltd., 2018) Merdin-Uygur, E.
The consumer behaviour literature is evolving towards the assumption that products are inherently experiential bundles, and after all, all businesses are operating within the experienced economy. Experiences are much more advantageous for the consumers because they advance happiness or enjoyment of life (instead of survival or maintenance). Experiential purchases lead to greater happiness levels compared to material purchases. Reliance on materialism and material purchases is shown to be the reason of low happiness levels in even the most affluent countries. In this chapter, based on theoretical as well as empirical papers, I analyse experiences and the consumption of experiences in the Turkish context. The arguments are supported by up-to-date market analysis of related industries conducted by independent market research agencies. The first section looks at the rise of experientialism in retail industries, such as in the case of shopping malls. The following sections touch upon main experiential categories such as tourism, dining and sports. Finally, the social aspects of experiences are discussed in the context of thirdplace experiences, and some empirical findings are presented. The chapter concludes with some recommendations for practitioners, experience designers, service providers as well as researchers. © 2018 by Emerald Publishing Limited. All rights reserved.
Citation - Scopus: 1
Conceptualizing Opportunities and Challenges Relevant To the Inclusion of Humanoid Service Robots in the Context of Covid-19
(Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH, 2022) Ozturkcan, S.; Merdin-Uygur, E.
The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened the need for a better understanding of how service robots (SR) can aid practitioners as well as society. Individuals must not only embrace the robotic environment but also learn how to collaborate with humanoid service robots for collective value creation. Starting with the eminence of humanoid SR in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, we majorly focus on anthropomorphism and social exclusion. These two key concepts present both opportunities and challenges, being the most eminent areas of research in the quest for understanding society-robot relationships. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
Understanding Customer Conversations in Social Media Support Interactions: Divergent Sentiments in Material and Experiential Brands
(Emerald Publishing, 2025) Kiygi-Calli, M.; Merdin-Uygur, E.; Önden, A.; El Oraiby, M.
Purpose – This study aims to investigate how customer sentiments differ in social media interactions with customer support accounts of material and experiential brands. It seeks to understand the impact of these interactions on customer sentiment dynamics and their implications for customer support strategies. Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on experiential recommendation literature, this study employs a sentiment analysis approach to analyze 60, 000 tweets directed at customer support accounts of three experiential and three material brands on X (formerly known as Twitter). Regression analysis is also applied to investigate the influence of post characteristics and content types (e.g. emojis) on sentiment. Findings – Results reveal significant differences between material and experiential brands in both overall sentiment and sentiment evolution during customer support interactions. Conversations with experiential brands exhibit more positive overall sentiments; whereas interactions with material brands demonstrate a greater positive sentiment shift despite initially exhibiting more negative sentiments. The findings also show that tweet length is a strong predictor of customer sentiment. Originality/value – This research underscores the unique roles of material and experiential brands in shaping customer sentiment during social media interactions. The study provides novel insights into online customer support dynamics and offers actionable recommendations for improving after-sales management strategies in social media contexts. © 2025 Emerald Publishing Limited