The analyses of critical success factors for service industries to develop service brands

Abstract

Developing a successful brand will be a critical strategy for service industries to achieve the competition advantage and raise the business performances. In this research, we propose a model of brand development for service organisations, which consists of five constructs: business model, brand strategy, service quality, customer value, and business performance. Based on this model, we can construct a structural equation model (SEM) to explore the causal relationships among the constructs, and then conduct the empirical study for the service companies with own brands, in order to confirm the relationships among these constructs, and to determine the critical success factors (CSFs) of the brand building for service industries. Based on the analytic results, the causalities among these constructs can be confirmed, it is shown that ‘business model’ directly determines the ‘brand strategy’, ‘service quality’ affects the ‘customer value’, and through the mediation effect of ‘customer value’ on ‘business performance’. We also discover that ‘key resources and processes’, ‘business operation systems’, ‘brand development’, ‘brand marketing’, ‘value-added services’, and ‘customer relationship management’ are the CSFs for service industries to build their brands; the service organisations need to possess the core capabilities on these CSFs.