Mail myopia: or examining financial services marketing from a brand commitment perspective

This paper is part of a doctoral study of how direct marketing affects brand commitment in the financial services sector. The research explores how to build consumer‐brand commitment within a UK personal finance context, focusing on retail banking. This paper reviews brand loyalty and brand commitment literature and assesses their relevance to personal finance, and their potential contribution as models and measuring instruments for a proposed study of direct mail relationship marketing programmes. Additionally the paper looks at aspects of the commitment construct itself from a review of literature including: relationship and interfirm marketing, organisational behaviour (employee‐employer commitment) and social psychology. The paper touches on the shortcomings of some of the brand commitment definitions available. The paper ends with a draft conceptual framework for use in marketing to develop brand commitment. It includes dimensions taken not only from brand loyalty/commitment literature but also from social psychology and interfirm marketing.