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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.

This chapter will look at the development, types and effectiveness of new forms of advertising in television (NFAs) and report on the current state of research in the field.

The most relevant contributions from the literature describing the practice and assessing the effectiveness of NFAs are presented and reviewed.

NFAs have emerged in response to the decreased effectiveness of conventional television advertising (spots) due to audience fragmentation, zapping, saturation and increased competition. Currently, NFAs are widely used around the world. Although the available empirical evidence indicates that NFAs are more effective than traditional spots in terms of recall, this chapter points to a need for better scientific understanding of key aspects of these new formats. Given the important role that NFAs play in how today’s television advertising market is managed, further research is needed on their effectiveness.

The literature on the practice and analysis of the effectiveness of NFAs is unfocused and varied, making it difficult to adequately determine whether the growing use of these formats can be justified on the grounds of proven arguments regarding the qualities that set them apart from traditional spots. In this regard, the summary provided in this chapter of both the state of knowledge about different types of new advertising formats on TV and their effectiveness is an important reflection of the state of the art in research on these formats.

Consumer resistance has been a popular research area in the previous decades, and concepts such as boycotting, brand avoidance, voluntary simplicity and anti-consumption appeared to be hot topics in exploring the ways the consumers resist market dominance in the postmodern culture. However, research on this topic in the Turkish (and partly Eastern) context is very limited, inhibiting our understanding of the topic in different economic and cultural settings. Through a comprehensive discussion that provides institutional-, structural- and community-level perspectives relating to consumer resistance phenomena in Turkey, a developing country with historical and cultural roots in both the East and the West, the chapter intends to equip scholars and practitioners with a better insight to conceptualise this phenomenon as well as to formulate further studies and marketing strategies.

Finding an efficient way for enhancing brand reputation by using social media among customers and business partners has long been the main purpose of every business. However, due to micro and macro changes in the business field, strategies to find a way to improve brand reputation with business partners and customers have altered from transaction marketing to newer approaches such as employing a social media platform. However, not all brands make use of social media to enhance their reputation. The present study uses Apple as an example of the one of the best known brands which does not benefit from social media platforms as to the degree expected.

Purpose – Little attention has been directed to investigating abandonment which refers to the deliberate choice of giving up something previously consumed. In this chapter, we look into meanings that motivate the abandonment of a product category and also the meanings abandonment gives rise to.

Design/methodology/approach – The research used a qualitative methodology to collect and analyze data obtained from in-depth interviews with 16 Brazilian consumers who gave up automobile ownership. This category was chosen due to its intense symbolic dimension.

Findings – The interviews suggest that, rather than being a discrete event, an action, or decision that is circumscribed by a given moment, abandonment is in fact a process. The analysis also outlines three types of abandonment: contingent, positional, and ideological. Contingent abandonment occurs when the individual, despite sharing the meanings with other consumers of the category, is forced to abandon consumption. Positional abandonment is driven mainly by the rejection of symbolic associations that consumption provides. Finally, ideological abandonment presents a collective perspective where the individual believes that society as a whole should abandon or reassess that consumption.

Practical implications (if applicable) – Results offer potential insights, for both governments and nongovernmental organizations involved in de-marketing efforts aimed at inappropriate consumption and companies interested in reversing the shrinking of their markets.

Originality/value – The present research broadens our knowledge of abandonment and allows us to situate it among other kinds of anticonsumption behaviors.