Customer-Perceived Reputation and Sustainable Satisfaction in the German Banking Sector: An Abstract

The reputation of companies is an important and well-researched topic in the marketing discipline. Positive reputation is known for having a positive influence on customer satisfaction and loyalty, which can lead to competitive advantage as well as an increase in a firm’s performance (Otto et al. 2020). This study looks at the drivers of reputation in the German banking sector as well as its influence on sustainable satisfaction from a customer perspective. The German banking sector is three-fold by tradition, in that it divides by commercial banks, savings banks, and cooperative banks. More recently, additional types of banks have evolved, such as online banks or sustainable banks. This study focuses on developing an overarching model, and builds on the reputation model by Schwaiger (2004). Accordingly, reputation is modeled as a two-dimensional construct, consisting of competence and likeability. The model is extended by sustainable satisfaction, which is a combination of the satisfaction and loyalty scales combined into a single target construct (cf. Höck et al. 2010).

An online survey was conducted and sent out to a sample of the German population consisting of bank customers above the age of 18 having at least one bank account. A variance-based statistical analysis method, partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), that allows to analyze the strength of the influence of the predictive constructs on the target construct in a path model, is applied. For evaluation, the SmartPLS 3 software (Ringle et al. 2015) is used. The findings show that, for the German banking sector, perceived attractiveness is the most important driver of both dimensions of corporate reputation, namely competence and likeability. Perceived quality is the second most important driver of likeability, whereas perceived performance is the second influential driver of competence. Furthermore, the affective dimension, likeability, is more important in explaining sustainable satisfaction, than competence.

The main theoretical contribution of this study is the adaptation of an established corporate reputation model to the German banking context and its extension with the concept of sustainable satisfaction. The results further have practical implications for the marketing departments of banks and their strategic positioning in the market. Future research might build on this extended model and use data from multiple countries in order to create a potential index for various types of banks and/or various customer segments. Moreover, the model should be controlled for demographic variables, such as age, gender, and income, as well as be tested with potential mediators, such as trust in banks, in future studies.