Corporate Image of Banks: Comparative Study in Bulgaria and Romania

Topics related to corporate brand image and the way customers perceive the brands are widely spread and gain a lot of attention among academics and practitioners as well. All specialists, who are engaged in the area of communication process and who convey messages to the target audiences, often ask themselves questions as follows: “What happens with the brand attitude after the advertisement” and more important: “How does that change influence on the real customer behavior?”. Despite the large number of publications, still the field of corporate image measurement in the banking industry seems less researched. Banking environments are challenging, with increasing competition. In addition to this, bank services are quite specific - they are intangible and require great engagement when the final decision is made. Due to the above mentioned, the present paper examines how two different advertising campaigns for UniCredit Bulbank and Bancpost Romania convey different attitude and form different images in customers’ minds. Brand image perceptual mapping study in the period of 20-31 July, 2018, is conducted. The main purpose was to find out what types of images, related to human characteristics acknowledge people for the tested advertisements. The study also shows how people assess the advertisements and to what extent they change their attitude towards the banks after they saw them. The target audience in the survey includes people, aged between 25-55 y/o, active banking users, urban population, as included are both countries (Bulgaria and Romania). The final purpose of the study is to give suggestions how to improve the advertising messages in the banks when it comes down to image dimensions and attributes from customer perspective. The implications also indicate the level of importance of customer surveys when it comes down to advertising campaigns.