The Impact of the Value of Commercial Bank's Brand on Customers' Opinion in Social Marketing Framework

Abstract

In today's world, attention to the customer and acceptance of the approach of customer orientation have become necessary for companies and banks. Companies, especially the commercial banks that do not integrate this approach into their system, will fail. Until a few years ago, banks competed for more market share, but now institutions and commercial banks strive to increase their customer share. From a social marketing perspective, the key to success is to pay attention to the competition and understand market behavior. Proper understanding of competitors' thoughts and behaviors, increasing the benefits of the desired behavior, and decreasing the costs and barriers to achieving it have led the competitive market to the advantage of the product or service. What is essential in this research is to be aware of the customer's desires and expectations from financial institutions and find the factors that strengthen the brand value of financial institutions. This study examines the value, importance, dimensions, and popularity of the brand of financial institutions among customers by using the proposed approaches in social marketing. This article is applied in terms of purpose, descriptive, and a survey in terms of the data collection method. The questionnaire was distributed to the customers using cluster sampling. In this study, six hypotheses were analyzed and tested. The final results showed that all the social marketing factors that were evaluated on the value of the Bank's brand and the customers' perception regarding the services received from the Bank were positive. According to the test results, the impact of social marketing factors on each dimension of the brand value indicated that social marketing had the most impact on brand satisfaction and the least impact on brand loyalty. The importance of the role of employees of financial institutions and their customers and the simultaneous attention to these two categories and not addressing critical issues such as these cases in Iran can raise new issues that are the novelty of this research.

Keywords: social marketing, brand value, customer orientation, commercial bank.