Coordination of Communication Budget with Marketing Objectives in the Banking Sector

The paper discusses the problem of establishing the communication budget in one of the most active sectors regarding marketing communication, the banking one. Firstly, we highlight the particularities of communication in the banking sector, based on the results presented in the specialized literature. The functions of marketing communication and the communication process are applied to the specifics of banking institutions and the main communication models that banks can use are indicated, depending on the objectives pursued. Also, the main means of banking communication and how they can be associated with marketing objectives are synthesized. Based on diversification of the means of communication, we emphasized the attention that banks must pay to integrated marketing communication, a concept whose application contributes to the efficiency of communication at the level of each targeted category. In the second part, we addressed the methods that banking institutions can apply to size their communication budget and how the efficiency of its allocation can be evaluated. The data presented are based on the documentary study and the realization of a case study applied to the banking field in Romania. Although the results show that the banking sector in Romania is one of the sectors with the highest advertising expenses, the trends evidenced in terms of banking communication at a global level cannot be ignored, so Romanian banks will have to adapt their communication strategy and, along with this, how the communication budget is allocated.