Culture and relationship marketing in neighborhood stores: Analysis of a peripheral region in Colombia

Sustainable growth and development can be the most important lesson that banks have learned in recent decades. Banks would gain many benefits, win the competition and develop sustainably if there have been more and more loyal customers. Customer satisfaction will help build customer loyalty. In order to have loyal customers, service quality must be good. Quality customer service of the bank is to ensure customer satisfaction and take their needs into consideration to improve service quality. High customer service quality will generate value not only to meet customer needs but also the expectations of customers and make banks more prominent than their competitors. This study identifies factors that affect customer satisfaction with the service quality at Vietnamese retail banks. The results are obtained by qualitative and quantitative method. The research model with a questionnaire consisting of 22 variables, 5 scales for a survey of 554 customers, is identified and developed through interviews with experts and group discussions. The findings show that customer satisfaction with the service quality at retail banks is influenced by “reliability”, “responsiveness”, “empathy”, “security”, and “tangibles”. Based on the findings, solutions for improving service quality are proposed for Vietnamese retail banks.

Over the years, the number of organizations investing in CSR activities has increased considerably. This increase is partially attributable to the intention of the organizations to give back to the society to repair and reduce the loss their intentional or unintentional actions might have caused to the environment. The government’s decision to make it mandatory for businesses to invest a small part of their net profit in social welfare activities has also helped nudge the organizations towards CSR activities. However, the question whether this investment influences customers’ intention to purchase the product in any manner remains an unresolved paradox. Limited researches have been conducted in this area to explore and establish the relationship if any between CSR and consumer purchase intention. This research focuses on the five different factors of CSR comprising of loyalty, morality, awareness, behavior and environment, which are identified from the previous literature. With the help of these factors, the authors researched and established the relationship between them and consumer purchase intention. In this descriptive research, the research questionnaire was distributed to 1500 respondents, using convenient sampling method, out of which 319 responses were finally obtained for the analysis purpose. After testing the reliability and validity of the data, the five hypotheses were tested using SEM (Structural Equation Modeling). It was found that all the five hypotheses were supported and thereby acknowledged the significant influence of CSR related activities performed by companies on the consumer purchase intention. The CSR driven morality is emerging to be the most important dimension that appears to influence the consumer purchase intentions. These finding will help decision-makers to formulate their promotion activities in such a manner that it aligns with the value system of the consumers and increase the overall consumer base.

This study investigates the mediating effect of emotional intelligence on the relationship between motivation, compensation, satisfaction, work climate and employees’ performance. The sample consists of 96 field officials who were the government employees specializing in coping with the eradication of Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever (DHF) in the district of Jember, Indonesia. Results using path analysis reveal that all examined variables positively and significantly affect employees’ performance. The study finds that emotional intelligence mediates the relationship of work motivation, compensation, work satisfaction, and work climate with employees’ performance.