Melike Demirbag Kaplan

A New Framework for Service Supply Chains

Despite the extensive amount of academic work devoted to supply chain management, today the structure of service supply chains still remains unexplored. The aim of this paper is to verify and explain this gap with regard to the unique nature of the services industry and the applicability of existing supply chain management literature to service businesses. This paper develops a new model for service supply chains and applies it to the healthcare industry. The results of this study are relevant both to practitioners in the services industry and to researchers conducting further studies in the field.

Branding places: applying brand personality concept to cities

Purpose – In recent years, brand personality as a branding construct has received considerable interest, which has led to a significant effort to develop tools to measure the personality of brands. Although the majority of these studies have focused on the brand personality of conventional product brands, the new boundaries of marketing obviously necessitate the application of branding constructs to non‐traditional products such as places. This study aims to focus on brand personalities of places, and to examine the applicability of this concept for city brands.Design/methodology/approach – The research employs a factor analysis method based on data collected from 898 college students.Findings – The findings of the study reveal that differentiating places with regard to their brand personalities is achievable. The paper introduces two new dimensions of brand personality for cities.Originality/value – The extraction of two new factors that contribute to place brand personalities is considered a major contr...

Educational Blogging Integrating Technology Into Marketing Experience

The major challenge of marketing education is that the discipline continually reinvents itself. Marketing approaches and practices once new rapidly become old and many texts grow outdated in a short period of time, increasing the pressure on the instructors to provide the students with the latest knowledge. The changing environment of business necessitates the integration of innovative tools into the curriculum to enhance experiential learning and develop soft skills. This article presents the adaptation of blogging as an innovative approach for building and improving necessary marketing skills. This approach requires the students to maintain blogs where, as part of the Marketing Management course, they can write about “anything marketing,” such as recent campaigns, commercials, new products, or their own marketing-related experiences to provide an experiential exercise in marketing and produce significant improvements in students’ soft skills. This article offers a detailed discussion of such outcomes based on qualitative and quantitative evidence.

Anti‐consumption of public services: vacci(not)ion for Swine Flu

Purpose – Anti‐consumption is a new domain of research that deals with why individuals avoid consumption of particular products. To date, research in this area is only confined to the rejection of goods, with no evidence from the services industry. The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent of anti‐consumption behaviour for public health services, by deriving data from Swine Flu vaccination resistance in Turkey.Design/methodology/approach – The research employs a factor analysis method based on data collected from 519 individuals.Findings – Findings suggest that there is a strong anti‐consumption attitude of the Turkish public towards the service, and a major reason for avoidance was moral incompatibility, such that the public believed that the vaccination served the interests of pharmaceutical companies and the government. The findings also reveal that all the factors previously mentioned in the literature may be involved in the anti‐consumption of public health products.Originality/value – This ...

Evaluation of satisfaction with over-the-counter weight loss supplements

The majority of studies on satisfaction with medication examine satisfaction with a prescribed pharmaceutical agent, while exploration of satisfaction with over-the-counter drugs is limited. This study aims to examine satisfaction with non-prescribed weight loss supplements and the factors that may affect satisfaction levels, such as overall body satisfaction. The participants in this study consisted of a convenience sample of 119 subjects who have either used weight loss supplement or are still using it at the time of enrollment. Results indicate that perceived effectiveness of weight loss supplement is the ultimate predictor of global satisfaction. Overall assessment of weight loss supplement revealed low satisfaction levels with regard to effectiveness and global satisfaction, while satisfaction with side-effects and convenience were relatively high. Body dissatisfaction was found to be significantly negatively correlated to satisfaction with effectiveness, side-effects and global satisfaction with wei...

Brand elevation in supply chains

In the last decades supply chain management has been explored from different perspectives fueling a myriad of research in the field. Although the literature on supply chain management (SCM) is vast, major gaps requiring scientific exploration still exist. Among these, interaction of branding and supply chain concepts clearly stands out. The aim of this paper is to investigate the power of brand in supply chains by taking literature devoted to supply chain management into consideration, relationship marketing and brand management. This paper explores the power of brand in terms of SCM and it defines the concept of “brand elevation in supply chain”. The objectives of this study are thus twofold: identifying “brand elevation in supply chain” concept and proposing a conceptual model associated to the power of brand in supply chains.