The role of brand love on bank customers' perceptions of corporate social responsibility

Purpose: The lovemarks theory (love and respect) is fairly new to the marketing literature and is now gaining much attention among marketing scholars. The study examined how brand love and brand respect moderate the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR), trust (TRUS), satisfaction (SAT) and loyalty (LOY) among bank customers in an emerging/and or a developing country's context. Design/methodology/approach: A quantitative survey approach was used. Data from a total of 769 banking customers, containing demographic and psychographic measures were used. Findings: This study tested six (6) hypotheses. The results confirmed the moderating role of brand respect on the relationship between CSR and TRUS in the banking sector. Also, our results reveal that BLOV moderates the relationship between SAT and LOY. The rest of our hypotheses did not confirm any significant relationship between them. Research limitations/implications: Like any academic exercise, this study also has some limitations. The hypotheses tested for brand love on bank customers' perceptions of CSR were based on a country study. The implication of brand love for CSR may be the same or vary in different country contexts. Practical implications: The study provides managers of banks and managers of financial institutions a better understanding of how love and respect could play a role in their loyalty program and how to incorporate these new constructs into the already known constructs such as satisfaction, trust and loyalty. Originality/value: This study is unique because it quantitatively examined the relationships between well-researched constructs corporate social responsibility (CSR), trust (TRUS), satisfaction (SAT) on loyalty (LOY) as well as examining these constructs with a fairly new constructs brand love (BLOV) and respect (BRES) in a single study.