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The aim of this research is to understand the factors behind smartphone purchase decisions of consumers. Nowadays companies make use of various strategies in order to attract new customers, retain existing customers and differentiate their products from those of their competitors. Perhaps, the most important and effective strategy to influence consumer behavior in the product selection is emphasizing the “brand name” of the products. Our aim in this paper is to investigate how smartphone brands can influence consumers’ buying decisions. Brand equity is a set of brand assets and liabilities linked to a brand name and symbol, which add to or subtract from the value provided by a product or service. It enhances the customer’s ability to interpret and process information, improves confidence in the purchase decision and affects the quality of the user experience. Using this construct widely discussed in the literature, we use and build our hypothesis based on Aaker model about the brand equity, including perceived quality, brand awareness, brand association and brand loyalty. The study involved a questionnaire administered to 171 smartphone consumers between December 2015 and March 2016. The consumers were chosen by convenience sampling among the students from a prestigious university in the Istanbul district of Turkey. Our findings indicate that a majority of the smartphone buyers’ decisions are mainly influenced by brand loyalty and brand awareness. Perceived quality and brand association do not seem to influence purchase decisions for the sample of this study.

The importance given by the governments to building a sound intellectual property infrastructure is increasing in developing countries and especially in Central Asian countries. This infrastructure is continuously improved to live up to a common standard in collaboration with government agencies, educational institutions and international agencies. In this paper, the infrastructure developments that took place in the Central Asian countries is going to be elaborated and furthermore some statistical analyses will be used in order to compare the differences and similarities between the Central Asian republics within themselves and the rest of the world. Patent based statistical data reveal a broad range of information concerning the innovative capability of countries, regions and firms. The number of patents that a country obtains in different technological fields and the change in this number over the years may provide useful information regarding the growth potential of the country and the ability to follow technological advances. For this purpose, patent statistics collected by institutions like World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) have been analyzed using statistical techniques. In addition to basic statistics, multidimensional scaling analysis (MDS) has been applied to the data sets.