Brand Building and Brand Extension in Service Sector: An Empirical Analysis

The work aims to analyze the role of brand building and brand extension in the service sector and to investigate how investment in marketing, communication and brand can affect the performance of a service enterprises. In particular this research focuses on the ability of banking business to transfer brand reputation and brand loyalty built up over time on extra-core activities. The methodology used for the research is the analysis of a single case study, that is appropriate because of the complexity of the topic in question. The research provides two levels of investigation. In the first part, after the literature review about the topic, it analyzes the strategies and investments in marketing and communication, in brand building and brand extension, highlighting the evolution of the last five years, with a quantitative and qualitative approach, through interviews with the management of the bank; in the second phase, the economic and managerial performance of the Bank are analyzed. The originality of the research is to show a managerial model integrated with its place, in which it creates added value for all local stakeholders, through a suitable and customer centric marketing planning. However the work, while showing the evolution of investments and strategies in brand building and brand extension, despite analyzing market share, customer retention and churn rate during the same period, it does not show through a quantitative approach possible correlations between these elements. Further researches provide for an update of the work that includes empirical analysis on consumer perceptions about brand equity.