Conclusions and implications
Theoretical implications
The aim of this study was to analyze the impact of customer engagement and the customer self-brand connection on customer advocacy and on financial performance. The study focused on a complex organization with a uniform strategy, but which attends the public in different centers (bank branches). This context allowed us to isolate the effect of the general marketing strategy from the effects of actions at the branch level, thereby capturing the activities of relational marketing at the micro level.
From this perspective, the study makes some significant innovative contributions to the literature. First, the concept of self-brand connection is further explored as the extent to which consumers have incorporated a brand into their self-concept, highlighting its essentially social and symbolic nature, in the frame of self-congruity theory (Sirgy, 1985), social-identity theory (Tajfel and Turner, 1979) and self-verification theory (Elbedweihy et al., 2016). The results show how marketing activities developed at the operational level influence the brand. In the context of a bank’s strategy, each branch implements the commercial and marketing activities that lead to the best match between the brand’s personality and the customers’ self-concept. These results also highlight the importance of supplementing the corporate brand strategy with personalized actions at the front office level.
