Consequences of customer engagement and customer self-brand connection

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of the customer engagement and customer self-brand connection on customer advocacy and firms’ financial performance. The research focuses on the financial sector and studies a complex organization with a uniform strategy, but which attends the public in different centers (bank branches). Design/methodology/approach A theoretical model of effects is tested using dyadic methodology, with 225 dyads (bank branch manager – average of five customers). The authors use structural equation modeling (EQS6.1) to test the relationships. Findings The results corroborate the hypotheses, with the exception of the influence of customer self-brand connection on financial performance. These analyses show that in the banking sector, where the intensive use of new information and technologies has led to a reduction in direct physical contact with the customer, the off-line experience continues to have a notable economic impact. Furthermore, investment in the brand from an experiential approach determines customer advocacy. Originality/value The contribution of this paper is twofold. This research analyzes from a theoretical and empirical perspective the impact of the customer engagement and customer self-brand connection on customer advocacy and firms’ financial performance.

How to Improve Customer Engagement: A Comparison of Playing Games on Personal Computers and on Mobile Phones

“…Owing to these features, most of operations and marketing strategies recently are proposed to focus on how to improve the gamers engagement to specific game activities in the online game field. Although customer engagement is rarely studied in the game field, it has attracted the attentions of many marketing scholars, who had pointed out that it can enhance firm performance, create value and bring competitive advantage for the company [1], [13], [56]. Therefore, we attempt to introduce customer engagement into the MOBA game field to explore how to improve customer engagement in game playing.…”

Service Quality and Customer Loyalty in a Post-Crisis Context. Prediction-Oriented Modeling to Enhance the Particular Importance of a Social and Sustainable Approach

“…The main purpose of this study was to analyze the explanatory power of service quality for predicting customer loyalty in the banking industry context, the sector that was most deeply and directly impacted by the recent economic crisis, with serious consequences for its customer relations. For this reason, at a key moment in which firms are recovering their competitive capacity in a sector characterized by great similarity across its services [6,13], identifying the factors that determine the continuation of satisfactory and long-lasting relationships with customers has spawned great interest in both the academic community and managerial circles [3][4][5]7,10,13,14,[23][24][25]. In this line of inquiry, the use of traditional structural equation models (ML-SEM) to estimate and explain loyalty establishes causal relationships among variables, but is limited when latent variables are used.…”

“…Personnel quality is related to the competencies and abilities employees bring to the job. Unlike manufacturing firms, service firms interact directly with their customers, meaning that service quality can be perceived immediately in situ from the interactive process and the activities and actions occurring between the customers and those providing the service [7,10,14,23,24,27].…”

“…Our study examines the Spanish banking sector, which perfectly illustrates these new determining relational factors. The consequences of the global crisis that happened between 2008 and 2014 were particularly severe in the financial sector, and triggered a series of deep changes in the competitive environment of modern financial entities [3,4,7,10,14]. This study is framed in a post-crisis market context in which, in general, customers' relational behaviors have been negatively affected.…”

“…Second, in a turbulent environment such as the present one, it is crucial for businesses to know which factors have the greatest influences on sustaining satisfactory and long-lasting relationships with their customers [3][4][5]10,13,14,23,24]. The need to discover these factors is even more pressing in the banking sector, if we bear in mind the increasing homogenization of the products and services banks offer [2]; as a result, the alternative on which to consolidate a competitive advantage must involve improvements to the process of delivering this undifferentiated service to customers [6,13].…”