CUSTOMER PERCEIVED IMPORTANCE OF SOCIALLY RESPONSIBLE MARKETING PRACTICES IN THE BANKING INDUSTRY

Due to changes in the social and natural environment, socially responsible (SR) practices are gaining attention from both academic and practitioner communities. Additionally, the growing sophistication of users, and their environmental and social awareness, have increased pressure on businesses to operate in a socially responsible manner. Understanding determinants of consumer perceptions of SR practices provides an opportunity to communicate more effectively with target audiences as well as differentiate from the competition. Banks, having a significant role in the development of an economy through their potential for prioritizing projects based on high environmental and socially responsible standards, hold one of the major levers in the development of society as a whole, and forwarding adoption of environmentally and socially sustainable economic activities. This research provides insight into banking service users' perceptions of the importance of socially responsible marketing practices (SRM) in the Croatian banking market. Data collection was based on a questionnaire distributed online to a sample of 260 banking service users, and the results were analysed using the latent class analysis (LCA) technique. The results revealed the existence of three clusters of users in the Croatian banking market relative to their awareness of banks' SRM practices. Namely - "fully aware", "moderately aware" and "unaware" clusters were identified. Furthermore, gender is shown to be a significant determinant of differences in the perceived importance of SRM practices among users of banking services. The same was not confirmed for income, the number of banks used (per individual client), and banking services delivery channels. An important contribution of this research lies in the fact that this is one of the first such studies in the banking sector. A general need for further research of SRM in the banking service sector is identified, providing the impetus for future studies.