Developing a Banking Brand Equity Model: Case of Branches of Bank Sepah

The brand and brand equity concepts have become more and more important as these concepts could effect on consumers perception and image of a company. But service brands are particularly different from physical goods and also they rely on employees’ actions and attitudes. The aim of this paper is to improve a conceptual framework of brand equity in banking industry. This study used a sample of 761 customers from Branches of Bank Sepah in Iran and Partial Least Squares (PLS) modeling for data analysis. The findings of this research indicate that brand association and brand loyalty have a positive and significant direct effect on brand equity and other variables include organization's presented brand, external brand communications, customer experience with organization, brand image, brand awareness and perceived quality emerge have a positive indirect effect on brand equity via brand association and brand loyalty. However, the degree of influence of each variable differs. Based on the findings of the study, a framework for brand equity has been proposed to the Bank Sepah, which in turn provides a great opportunity for future study.