Marketing bank services to corporate clients

Abstract

This paper examines important issues regarding the marketing of financial services to corporate customers in Cyprus, where growing competition and government policy have created major challenges for existing banks. A key competitive issue is the way banks manage their existing customer relationships whilst developing their “product” range and service quality to meet increasingly sophisticated and demanding corporate clients. The relationship marketing approach forms the central theoretical perspective on which the empirical work was based. In‐depth interviews with the major banks and a sample of medium‐sized Cypriot companies were conducted to determine the nature of bank usage and buying behaviour, as well as perceptions of service quality among respondent companies. Interesting differences emerge in the research findings regarding the importance of various banks evaluation criteria as perceived by bank executives on the one hand and by corporate financial decision‐makers on the other. The research also identifies significant differences between clients' expectations and perceptions of bank performance on a number of service quality dimensions. These findings have a number of managerial implications which are discussed in the conclusions.