Estratégias de relacionamento no setor bancário brasileiro: um estudo empírico

Abstract

In times of hipercompetition, the organizations are seeking alternative ways of increasing their presence, mainly in mature markets. In this context, the relationship approach is becoming important. There are, in the existing literature, a great number of definitions for the subject, but it is easy to find some common aspects among them: long term orientation, concern about maintaining the customers, and the importance of the interactions. In relationship marketing, the focus moves from market share to customer share. Of course, the relationships must be mutually perceived and desired, so the organization should show to the client that wants the relationship, which benefits he might receive. In the relationship marketing literature, models have been developed mainly for business-tobusiness contexts. But it is also possible to apply the relationship approach for the consumer markets (business to consumer). Specifically, in the service sector, there are evident possibilities, because the customers, necessarily, have direct contact with the providers. The bank sector has been under modifications, for example, intense processes of global acquisitions and mergers. Finance services are complex in nature, high risk targeted and the customer, usually, is someone that doesnt know much about specific products. These aspects ease the relationship approach, as the customer needs to trust the institution. Besides that, the bank contacts made by the customers are rarely unique, what might mean that a series of future interactions should happen. Little is known about relationship strategies being applied at Brazilian banks. So, it is necessary to quantify the relationship degree that exists within the constructs that define the relationship management bank environment, in the customers point of view. The main objective of the research, descriptive in nature, is to propose a model that represents the bank relationship context. Its an adaptation, to the consumer market, of the relationship model proposed by Morgan and Hunt (1994)2. The model being proposed utilizes someoriginal constructs: relationship benefits, communication, trust, relationship commitment, termination costs, opportunistic behavior, propensity to leave, functional conflicts. The main instrument of the research was a survey, applied to college students who have a bank account. The scales used were, mainly, adapted from the original ones. Specifically, a new scale was proposed and validated for the relationship benefits. Since they were mostly adapted, all of the other scales were also validated for the consumer market context, to which they have beenapplied. For this purpose, an exploratory factor analysis was performed to verify the validity and the reliability of the scales, purifying them, as necessary. Also, the convergent, discriminant and nomological validity were tested and verified. After that, the complete proposed model was tested through a confirmatory factor analysis.