Examining the effect of brand heritage on brand image and consumer purchase intentions

In today's competitive markets, it is critical for firms to differentiate their businesses and products from their competitors. With the effects of technology and globalization, it is seen that the variety of products and brands has increased, but there are almost no differences in terms of the criteria which consumers will observe via making their choices. Therefore, it is becoming more and more important to create strong and different brands in the national and/or international market. Since the studies show that consumers trust and prefer of the brands, which they have been familiar with for a long time, the brand heritage which is seen as a dimension of the brand identity of successful long-term enterprises has been the subject of increasing interest in recent years. Brand heritage is a concept that includes long-lasting brands that have fundamental values and are known, have symbols, and are known, which give importance to past performance and history. The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of brand heritage on the purchase intention and brand image through the conceptual model. Within the scope of the research, Sabancı Brand was selected for testing the scales and model. The reasons for this, the brand provides all the brand heritage dimensions and it is one of the first brands that comes to mind when the brand heritage is mentioned in the preliminary study. In this quantitative process structured for this purpose, data were collected on a voluntary basis from 820 consumers from Adana and Istanbul with pre-structured questionnaire forms. After the data collection, reliability analysis results showed that the reliability level of the scales used in the research was very high. The findings show that brand heritage has a positive and statistically significant effect on consumers' intention to purchase for that brand. In addition, the results of the analysis showed that brand heritage has a positive and statistical effect on brand image and brand image has tge possitive effect on consumers' intention to purchase. The findings were interpreted in terms of theory, businesses and consumers. Keywords: Brand heritage, brand image, purchase intention