Customer Based Brand Equity: A Factor Analytical Approach

Banking is a customer oriented service industry and Indian banks have started realizing that business depends on client service and the satisfaction of the customer. This is compelling them to focus on building brand equity that leads to enhancing the customer satisfaction. Some authors suggest a positive connection between Customer Satisfaction and Brand equity (Aaker, 1992; Anderson and Sullivan, 1993; Blackston, 2000; Keller, 1993). For building successful brand equity in the banking sector, customers must be convinced that there are meaningful differences among the banks brands. Customer's perceptions play an important role inenhancing the brand value. Building a powerful brand is all about creating the strongest positive perception in the minds of customers (James Hammond, 2013).Branding helps to make a perception in the minds of customers. Once that perception is made, it is very difficult to change the perception because it blocks all the senses of customers. Banks need to find out what are the main determinants of customer's perception towards bank brand so that they can focus on those particular dynamics. The current paper aims to serve the aforesaid purpose i.e.to identify those factors which determine the strong customer based brand equity in the banking industry. For this purpose, a structured questionnaire was developed and a sample of 120 respondents was taken from selected Public Sector banks and Private Sector banks. The results produced six factors i.e. Brand investments, Brand performance, Brand salience, Brand verdict, Brand feelings and Brand unfamiliarity accounted for 73 percent variance. The findings revealed that out of the six factors extracted from the study, Brand verdict emerged as the most significant factor that leads to the determination of customer based brand equity