The effect of brand familiarity to consumer purchase decision-making; A research over the foreign tourists coming to visit Ephesus ancient site

Brand familiarity is one of the most important steps on the way to branding. After the knowing process has been completed and the familiarity of the product and service increase, it means that product or service become a brand. Therefore, the higher familiarity of a brand has than its competitors means that more sales in proportion. Such an environment that the competition dominates in our day, not only institutions but also the destinations of the countries are in the race with each others. In order to become a center of attraction of these destinations with marketing home and abroad, the brand power has an important role on the way to increase brand familiarity. By featuring the touristic product identities of the destinations in a country and provide these destinations to be well-known, main condition is to host more and more visitors. In this study, it was tried to learn that the familiarness of the Ephesus ancient site where is the one of the most important touristic destinations in Turkey by the foreign visitors. It was searched that the knowledge of the foreign visitors coming to visit Ephesus would show a differentiate in significantly according to their demographic features like gender, age, education situation, montly income and nationality or not and at the end of the research it is determined that the knowledge had already been existed differentiated according to education situation and the nationality belonged to. KEYWORDS: Brand Familiarity, Brand, Destination, Ephesus Ancient Site