Effects of global and local branding on consumer perception: An application

In today?s globalization era, homogenization of needs and lifestyles, increased travel around the world and communication via internet gives global brands a strategic importance for both companies and consumers. On the other hand, local brands still have important place for nationalistic or economic reasons. Therefore, in such an atmosphere, in global marketing literature, it is important to understand perceptions and attitudes of consumers toward global and local brands. In the literature, global brands are the signs of the quality and some consumers find global brands having better quality even if there is no difference in terms of quality with some local ones. Therefore, this study is important to understand whether globalism creates higher quality perceptions and higher brand image or not and localism creates lower quality perceptions or not. This study explores the relation between Perceived Brand Globalness (PBG) and other variables: Perceived Brand Quality (PBQ) and Brand Image (BI). The sample consists of the students of undergraduates, master and PhD students and a small amount of post-doctorate academicians of Business Department of Dokuz Eylul University and Ege University of Izmir. The objective of this study is to investigate the perceptions of consumers about global brands and to understand whether perception of brand globalness relates positively to quality perception and brand image or not. For strengthening the hypotheses, Consumer Ethnocentrism and Prior Brand Experience effects are also analyzed as supporting variables. As a result of the analysis, it is found that Perceived Brand Globalness is positively related to Perceived Brand Quality and Brand Image.