Consumer Attitudes Towards Counterfeits Of Branded Luxury Products And Their Risk Perceptions In This Context- A Field Study From Eski?Eh?R, Turkey

This study intends to find out the different attitudes of of Turkish consumers towards counterfeits (and sometimes called as pirated versions) of branded luxury items. A survey on 540 respondents who are selected via stratified sampling of whom 536 are found eligible to be analyzed. The respondents are required to answer 35 questions of which five are related to demographic characteristics of these respondents. The rest 30 are statements which are designed to reflect the behavior of these people. The study consists of five parts. The first part is an introduction where the scope and the purpose of the study are concisely stated. The second part relates to the theoretical background of the subject matter and the prior researches carried out so far. The third part deals with research methodology, basic premises and hypotheses attached to these premises. Research model and analyses take place in this section. Theoretical framework is built and a variable name is assigned to each of the question asked or proposition forwarded to the respondents of this survey. 30 statements or propositions given to the respondents are placed on a five-point Likert scale. The remaining five questions about demographic traits as age, gender, occupation, educational level and monthly income are placed either on a nominal or ratio scale with respect to the nature of the trait. Ten research hypotheses are formulated in this section. The fourth part mainly deals with the results of the hypothesis tests and a factor analysis is applied to the data on hand. Here exploratory factor analysis reduces 30 variables to five basic components as "Favor for counterfeits; luxury-oriented social status; risk perception; brand loyalty and brand prestige. Cronbach's Alpha for scale reliability is quite high (? = 0.779) and so is the sample adequacy ratioo (KMO = 0.906) In addition non-parametric bivariate analysis in terms of Chi-Square is applied to test the hypotheses formulated in this respect. The fifth part is the conclusion where findings of this survey is listed.