Differentiating Financial Service Brands Through Multilayered Service Strategy : Some Insights From the Resource-Based View of the Firm

The paper examines how financial service organizations operating in the Nigerian banking industry can be effectively managed to achieve brand differentiation. A service brand model was reviewed, critiqued and a Multilayered Service Strategy (MSS) model of service brand differentiation grounded on Barney's concept of Resource-Based View (RBV) was put forward. Sixteen leading-edge corporate marketing and communication practitioners with experience in service branding were engaged to examine the effectiveness of the model through in-depth interviews. The analysis of data indicates that effective differentiation of a service brand cannot be achieved through a single business or organizational factor. Rather, corporate communication managers/directors should be encouraged to develop the habit of deploying or incorporating valuable, rare, inimitable and un-substitutable resources in corporate advertising materials and other corporate communication texts. These resources provide the foundation for engendering an effectively differentiated service brand, and also endow service organizations with a superior competitive advantage in the marketplace