سید مهدی ساعتچی

The purpose of this research is to identify the factors influencing the creation of brand identity in the banking industry of Iran. According to its purpose, the research method is applicable, and in terms of implementation, it is qualitative and based on the case study approach. The statistical population of this research includes Iranian banking industry experts who were senior managers of Bank Mellat in Tehran. The number of 23 experts who had sufficient knowledge and expertise in the field of brand was selected by judgmental sampling and snowball method, and data collection was done using semi-structured interview tool. The interviews were continued until theoretical saturation was reached, and the text of the interviews were analyzed and coded using the MAXQDA 2018 software. Data analysis led to the identification and extraction of research findings including 130 primary codes, 33 concepts, and 10 categories. Based on the results of this research, the categories of goals and strategies, structure and processes, human resource management, organizational culture, internal branding, communication, banking services, financial power, visual identity, and verbal identity are identified as the important factors affecting the creation of identity in the banking industry of Iran.

One of the fundamental concepts in the domain of brand is brand identity. The purpose of this research is to discover the effective categories on brand identity building in Iranian banks and examine the relationships between them, in order to present a model. The method of this research is mixed and the systematic approach of Grounded theory has been used to design the model.In the qualitative phase we collected data from interviews with 23 banking experts (Mellat Bank) and research concepts were extracted from the text analysis of the interviews. Then, in order to confirm the qualitative phase of research and test the model, we used a questionnaire that was distributed among 112 banking experts (Sepeh, Maskan, Tejarat, Parsian and Saman banks). The sampling in the qualitative phase, was judgmental and snowballing, and in the quantitative part, was cluster sampling. In the process of qualitative data analysis, we found 350 primary codes, 79 concepts and 23 categories. The central phenomenon of this research was Building brand identity, and the findings included the following categories: lack of community awareness, lack of sufficient trust among society and customers, decrease in customer satisfaction, decrease in customer loyalty, domestic competitors, decrease in employee’s commitment and degradation of brand image as causal conditions. The categories of goals and strategies, human resources management, internal branding, communication, services and tools, financial strength and choosing the type of customers as strategies.  The categories of organizational culture, structure and processes as background conditions. The categories of political, social and economic limitations as intervening conditions. The results of the research show that the use of strategies presented for brand identity building in banks has a high impact on achieving the consequences of creating brand citizenship behavior in employees and creating a favorable brand image in the society.