The Nexus Between Social Media Marketing Efforts and Overall Brand Equity in the Banking Sector in Bangladesh: Testing a Moderated Mediation Model

Abstract In the era of Marketing 5.0, crafting a favorable brand attitude and engaging consumers with a banking brand has become the most critical and challenging task for bank marketers to enhance overall brand equity. Previous research did not suggest how effectively social media marketing efforts enhance overall brand equity in the financial service sector. In response to this gap, this study aims to examine how social media marketing efforts (SMME) influence overall brand equity (OBE) through consumer brand engagement (CBE) and brand attitude (BAtt) in the banking sector in Bangladesh. Furthermore, brand trust (BT) is tested as a moderator of SMME and CBE. The data were obtained by a self-administered questionnaire from a total of 263 banking consumers in Bangladesh using a systematic sampling method. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to investigate hypothesized relationships. The results indicated that SMM efforts directly influence CBE and BAtt. CBE and BAtt partially mediate the relationship between SMME and OBE. Moreover, the results confirmed the moderating role of brand trust on the link between SMME and CBE. The findings of this research offer significant implications for building overall brand equity in the social media marketing perspective, particularly for the banking sector.