Explaination the Concept of Brand Image in a Narrow

Brands have a good vary of practices for businesses, merchandise and people in today’s dynamic promoting landscape, wherever publication and message distribution are not any longer restricted to media entities. Every brand is competing for time and a spotlight in today’s world to interrupt the message litter so as to make relationships with their target market.

Brands are shorthand marketing messages that create emotional bonds with consumers. Brands are composed of intangible elements related to its specific promise, personality, and positioning and tangible components having identifiable representation including logos, graphics, colors, and sounds. A brand creates perceived value for consumers through its personality in a way that makes it stand out from other similar products. Its story is intricately intertwined with the public’s perception and consistently provides consumers with a secure sense that they know what they’re paying for. In a world where every individual is also a media entity, your consumers own your brand.

According to the work of Romaniuk, Wight, & Faulkner (2017) brand awareness is a capacity of a given customer to recognize or recall that a given brand belongs to a particular category of products. Brand awareness is strongly related to the power with which the presence and traces of a brand in customers’ minds result in their capacity to recognize (identify) the brand under various market conditions.

In management sciences, one can come across many definitions, which explain the concept of brand image in a narrow and Broadway. For instance, Keller (1993), Hung (2008) and other authors (Capriotti, 1999; Da Silva & Syed Alwi, 2008) indicate that brand image is an idea about a given brand linked to associations in customers’ memory.

Pars & Gulsel (2011) at the same time underline that brand image is an impression made as a consequence of numerous factors (e.g., associations linked with a given brand name, purchasing experience, reputation of a given company, forms and measures of advertising, promotion, etc.), which means that from the viewpoint of various recipients it is a complex, inhomogeneous and quite an abstract category.

Brand image is often associated with brand identity. In his definition, Upshaw (1995) treats brand identity as “the configuration of words, images, ideas, and associations creating the total brand image in buyers”. Numerous authors, including Kall (2005), also draw attention to the fact that brand identity is shaped consciously by its owners and it aims at determining the meaning, intent, and calling of a given brand. Dr. Venkatesh, Bhagya Lakshmi (2011) in their study, “Effect of branding on Marketing of Banking Services in India.” stated that, strong brand scores high on brand preference, loyalty, awareness, recall, and usage.

This study outlines how service brand strength is often assessed by measuring the brand strength in the employee perspective and also the client perspective on an individual basis. It provided a strategy by undertaking a study on banks in India. It additionally evaluates among the public sector, non-public and foreign banks in terms of their employee satisfaction, client satisfaction, and customers perception concerning services and advantages. The study glided by the descriptive analysis style during which samples were drawn from two populations i.e. customers and staff of private, public sector and foreign banks.

The study found that employees of public and private sector banks understand their banks differently. It additionally found that demographic segments understand the private, public sector and foreign banks are similar. The study suggested internal and external brand developments among banks. Dinesh.S (2014) in his study “Customer-based brand equity in the banking industry comparison of private and public sector banks in Cuddalore district” mainly focused on the banking industry. Earlier, sellers were in the dominant position which was a tragic era for the shoppers, however, because of the technological advancement and data that has enhanced brought in manufacturers and sellers in exponential numbers and left the shoppers in an exceedingly powerful scenario for higher cognitive process suiting their desires, tastes, and preferences.

This study views that banks’ strategic promoting agenda in the present liberalized corporate India should take under consideration the brand management on the service differentiation and also the integrated marketing communication issues that are in line with the customers’ knowledge, levels of awareness, behaviour intentions, effective –emotional bondage with the brand, loyalty status foremost to positive customer response. during this course the finding has given strong signs to the industry for positioning itself powerfully within the minds of the customer for earning an improved brand equity.

Dr. Joshi Krunal (2017), in his study “An in-depth study on consumer attitude and buying behavior towards private brands with special reference to Gujarat state” analyses that customers who have a positive private brand perspective have certain demographic and psychographic characteristics that distinguish them from the consumers who aren't private brand positive. He discerned that store image value and perceived quality are some of the vital psychographic variables that impact the consumer’s brand perspective whereas age, gender, family financial gain, and size are some of the demographic variables that explain the positive private brand perspective and proneness. customers of private brands are worth sensitive, however not all of them. Some customers are quality conscious that stands second when the value variable.

It was found that Banker’s perception of service performance is different from the customer’s perception of service performance in the Indian banking industry. It was also found that there is no significant difference in the perceptions of the service performance of private and public banks. There was a strong positive agreement between customers and bankers on the effects of teamwork, employee-job fit, technology fit and role ambiguity on service quality dimensions. Sivakumar, V J (2003) in his study “Customer relationship management in the Indian banking industry a study with reference to retail banking” viewed that the Indian bank customers at present are left with boundless choices of retail products and with ever-increasing opportunities.

In this situation, the bankers to remain competitive have to meet the expectations of the customers much better than the opposing players in the market. This situation has led the bankers to focus on customer relationship management, to have the customers as all-time profitable partners; which in turn leads the bankers to achieve better and endure better performance for the never-ending period. The customer relationship in retail banking has a number of issues and these issues have brought the researcher to take up this study.

The study is based on the survey conducted on HDFC bank, ICICI bank (Private sector banks), Indian Overseas Bank, State Bank of India (Nationalized banks), Standard Chartered and Citi bank (Foreign banks). The study offers an insight into the development of banking in India with attention to retail banking; that would enable us to have a clear understanding of the Indian banking industry.

The study focuses on various aspects concerning relationship building in the retail banking industry. The study found that there is a difference in the perception of customers and bankers with respect to several aspects of relationship management. Such perception gaps should be minimized so that the bankers can gain an advantage in the competitive environment. An effective customer relationship management program planned and implemented will provide a win-win platform to both the service provider name, the bankers and the service user namely, the customers.

Shetty, Khyati (2017) in their study “Dynamics of brand personality congruence and its influence on trust customer satisfaction and loyalty in banking an empirical study.” Planned to measure and application of brand personality congruence (BPC), that is outlined because of the gap between the customer’s own personality and also the brand personality as perceived by the customer.

Today’s banking sector is armed with robust competitive methods to fulfill the ever-increasing challenges; nonetheless, accomplishing brand Loyalty in its true sense has still remained insurmountable. brand personality plays an important role in making, developing and maintaining robust brands. The study concerned 2 sections: The study primarily centered on the development of the BPC scale in specific reference to the industry and also the different phase enclosed testing the link between BPC and post-purchase analysis, which specifically centered on Trust, Satisfaction and whole Loyalty.

Results showed strong positive relationships, that recommended that higher congruence with the brand’s personality leads to multiplied trust and brand loyalty. BPC had the highest direct impact on trust and brand loyalty and indirect effects on Satisfaction through trust. C. Sivaranjani (2017) in her study “customers perception towards retail banking of the new generation private banks in Puducherry” it is found that retail banking is getting hold of momentum in recent years. As this study is limited to customers of the new generation in private banks in Puducherry, the findings cannot be generalized in a wider context.

Banking is one of the tremendous sectors that have the potential to grow in India. However, the Indian banking sector faced diverse and concurrent challenges such as increased competition, rising customer expectations, and falling customer loyalty. The major task for the banking industry is to serve the mass and huge market of India. The changing regulatory environment has an enormous impact on banks over the last years. In this composite and fastchanging environment, the only sustainable competitive advantage is to give the customer an ideal blend of technology and traditional service. As banks develop their strategies for giving customers access to their accounts through various advanced services like e-banking, mobile banking, and net banking, they should also view this evolving platform as a potential catalyst for generating operational efficiencies.

The findings of the present study reveals that absence of customer intimate strategy, unskilled employees, poor quality of customer service, absence of compliant monitoring cell, inadequate range of products, poor communication, poor understanding the customers, delay in service, poor state of trustworthiness, lack of creativity and innovativeness, absence of customer contact programmes, lack of staff participation, lack of customer segment-specific strategies and absence of update information are the problems of the customers related to retail banking services of the new generation private banks. To keep up with the fast step of innovation, the new generation private banks need to choose which technological capabilities to build in-house or attract via partnerships or joint ventures. The study provoked the authority concerned to take some optimistic measures for improving the standard of retail banking of new generation private banks in Puducherry.

Riston, Mark in their article, “Brand tracking: try it and you'll never look back.” Stated that there are no sense tracking brands until there are a clear target segment and an agreed brand positioning. It is optimal to use more general market research to inform the decisions before starting the repetitive, quantitative business of brand tracking.

The purpose of brand tracking is to assess the state of the brand and guide approach for the year ahead. A single comprehensive survey is sufficient unless a company has more than one planning cycle. It is ideal to track the brand once in a year. That session should take place about a month before your finance department does the budgets. A decent survey should not exceed 25 questions. Bad brand tracking is easy to identify because it only measures the good stuff. Decent tracking usually has eight to ten attributes among which half of them are negative ones. Never ask consumers to evaluate the importance of different attributes. They may not know the answer and it's a huge waste of questions. Ask the consumers to rate your brand on the attributes and then rate a competitor against the same list.

A huge share of many marketing research budgets is spent on tracking studies. Booming organizations focus on their brands and tries to find out their impact on the market. They seek evidence of the impact of their activities when they are successful and hope to identify slumps in performance or perception in a timely fashion so that negative business results can be avoided. Tracking studies are often the most noticeable products of research departments all over the organization and are critical for tracking customer loyalty as a leading indicator of defections. They can also track brand and advertising awareness to measure the usefulness of advertising campaigns. Finally, tracking studies help track brand image to monitor investments made in brand-building efforts and to understand growing consumer perceptions of brands and products.

Tracking research, together with brand awareness and customer loyalty tracking, represents a substantial investment. Tracking projects can include many statistical comparisons that are not actually meaningful. The power and reliability of these projects can frequently be simply and inexpensively increased by tracking means. Reporting more sensitive metrics, rather than familiar but less quantitatively rich measures, can help to overcome the hidden limitations of tracking research.

Renugadevi S (2017) in her study “Customers Attitude Towards Retail Banking, A Study with Reference to Commercial Banks in Madurai District” expresses that there is a need for continuous innovation in retail banking. This involves product development and differentiation, innovation and business process reengineering, microplanning, better marketing, careful pricing, customization, technological upgradation in personal banking as well as online banking. Customers prefer to go to banks only as and when it is needed since most of the services are available online. 

Banks may improve their online services by make things easier to perform. Cordial response from employees is the major expectancy of customers. Customers at all times look for a more user-friendly environment and product innovation in a competitive pricing strategy. Uses of ATM services as the main e-banking services get complaints such as machine out of cash and out of services, card blockage. For satisfying customers, the bank should follow an active complaint handling mechanism. Delay in the transaction is also a foremost problem mentioned by the customers. Hidden charges, made by the banks are the main aspect of customer displeasure. Appointing adequate no of employees and their knowledge in computers will evade such a kind of problem.

Phone advertisement and television advertisement are the most superior source of awareness for banking services. Any service charge made by the bank must be at the knowledge of customers. All the service quality aspects such as assurance, responsiveness, reliability, tangibility, and empathy are lesser than the expectation of customers Though the customers face problems in various banking transactions many do not show switching intention, upholding their loyalty to the banks. Hence commercial banks must progress their service quality to satisfy their customers more than they expected.