Events marketing, brand orientation and performance of commercial banks in Kenya

Abstract

The manner in which organizations conduct their marketing has undergone great change from the traditional advertising to new approaches that are responsive to new market needs. Though traditional advertising still controls major marketing activities, event marketing and branding are becoming important in marketing activities. Commercial banks, too, use events marketing and branding to market their services. The aim of this study was to establish how the use of event marketing and branding affected the performance of commercial banks. The study adopted a descriptive survey research design. The study targeted the 42 commercial banks currently operating in Kenya. A sample of 25 commercial banks was used. Marketing managers provided the information required through completing a self-administered questionnaire. 22 out of 25 questionnaires were used in the analysis making a response rate of 88 percent. Analysis was done using mean, standard deviation, percentage and regression. The results show that event marketing as used by commercial banks does not significantly contribute to the performance of the banks that use it as a marketing strategy. The customer orientation strategy used adversely affects performance, and even so, customer orientation strategy of branding does not significantly contribute to performance. Competitor orientation strategy of branding does not contribute to performance of commercial banks. The strategies used for brand positioning did not effectively contribute to performance of commercial banks. On aggregate, the brand positioning and event marketing strategies used by commercial banks do not improve performance. The study recommends that event marketing should effectively focus on the customers with the aim of effectively highlighting the products and their prices. In customer orientation of product branding, commercial banks should come up with programs to enhance customers’ loyalty and make their products more preferable to their customers. Commercial banks should improve on the market intelligence they gather from competitors and strive to use the intelligence to design competitive strategies to enable then gain competitive advantage. Commercial banks should make their products even more sharply different from those of competitors. This will be achieved by emphasizing on the customer and delivering superior value. Commercial banks need to improve the ease with which customers access services. Commercial banks need to carry out event marketing with the aim of highlighting their products and services and how differentiated their products are.