Promotion Strategies and Performance of Commercial Banks: Evidence from CRDB Bank Plc in Tanzania

Abstract

This article is informed by the planned behaviour and hierarchy of effect theories to examine the influence of five traditional promotion strategies on the performance of commercial banks in Tanzania, taking evidence from one of the leading commercial banks in the country - CRDB Plc. This quantitative based study used a self-administered questionnaire to collect data from randomly selected 208 sampled employees. With the support of the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) software, a hypothesised model that included promotion strategies as predictors of commercial banks’ performance was evaluated using a multiple linear regression model. The results supported the hypothesised model, indicating that all the promotion strategies had positive; and only four (excluding publicity) had important influence on the performance of commercial banks. From the findings, the study recommends that commercial banks need to innovatively prioritise adoption of the complementary use of the four significant promotion strategies of sales promotion, advertising, personal selling, and direct marketing to manage the performance of commercial banks. Nevertheless, publicity should not be entirely ignored as it also has some positive effect.

Keywords: commercial banks, planned behaviour theory, hierarchy of effects theory, promotion strategies.