The role of customer relationship management, service quality and innovation as sources of brand equity development

In the highly competitive medical tourism market environment of today, Brand Equity (BE) could become a competitive edge for survival for service providers. In general, medical tourism has been perceived to have a low BE, especially in Jordan. The contribution of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Service Quality (SQ), and innovation in developing BE, cannot be ignored as far as literature is concerned. However, studies on marketing activities towards building BE remain limited. Hence, this study aims to investigate the contributions of CRM, SQ and innovation in developing BE, to medical tourism service providers. Since a sampling frame was not available, the study obtained its data through systematic sampling using a self administered questionnaire to build a sampling frame of medical tourists. Some 500 respondents were next selected randomly from the sampling frame using the simple random sampling technique. The Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) procedure in IBM-SPSS-Amos 23.0 was used for data analysis. The findings indicated that both CRM and SQ had significant effects on innovation. Innovation, on the other hand, had a significant effect on BE. However, only SQ had significant direct effects on BE while the direct effects of CRM were not quite significant. The results imply that the mediating innovation plays a full mediation role in linking CRM to BE, while innovation plays a partial mediation role in linking SQ to BE. These findings offer several contributions towards building BE as a competitive edge as far as medical tourism service providers are concerned. Future research should incorporate other constructs that may enhance BE. Other mediators are also recommended for future research on the impacts of both CRM and SQ on the BE.