Consumer buying phenomena in digital marketing its effect on brand loyalty with its decision: A study on university students in İstanbul province

In today's conditions of intense competition, the condition for maintaining their existence is to turn to the electronic environment and use the internet and digital technology effectively. In the information age we live in, most of the elements of the economy have changed. It is seen that the ways of doing business have changed in the knowledge economy, which is seen as the new economic order. The Internet has allowed economic activities to be carried out on a global scale. The marketing activities of the enterprises have also started to be carried out in the virtual environment. Due to the expected frequency of use in social media in the coming years, many brands are carrying out some activities to create brand awareness, to affect their target brand awareness and the purchasing decision stage of the consumer, thanks to the promotion of their services as well as their products in social media. The most popular of these activities are social media phenomena, whose number of followers is constantly increasing on social media and which is thought to affect their followers. In the digital world, the term phenomenon is mostly used to describe people who affect society on virtual platforms or social media. It is an important factor for brands that they have a lot of followers or that they are activating the target audience thanks to their large number of views. Word of mouth marketing is a concept that we are all familiar with and they shape all kinds of consumer habits, from which product to buy, which series to watch in one sitting or which application to download. The phenomena, which are shown as the opinion leaders of digital marketing, are also in the lead role of a new marketing method. This method is called phenomenon marketing in the marketing literature. The aim of the research is to determine whether the trust in social media phenomena affects the brand loyalty process in digital marketing, which is accepted as a new marketing method, and to determine the effect of the followers on the purchasing decision process with the product promotion of the phenomena. Another purpose is to determine whether consumers' purchasing decision and brand loyalty vary according to demographic characteristics in phenomenon marketing. For this purpose, two independent sample tests, T-test and ANOVA, were used to determine whether there was a difference in the purchasing and brand loyalty process according to gender, age, education level, daily social media usage time, and the number of phenomena followed. During the data entry process, IBM SPSS 22 package program was used. In the research, 398 voluntary participants from consumers studying in Istanbul and using social media were reached and analyzed by using the online survey method. According to the data obtained, the survey participants saw the phenomena that they found sincere and that could produce their own content more reliable. The reason why phenomena are followed is the sense of curiosity and knowledge about the products. In the brand awareness process, it was determined that the phenomena were more active in the consumer purchasing decision process than the brand awareness, although there was no significant difference according to the age groups and being affected by the phenomena.