Customer Relationship Quality as a Mediator: The Role of Attractive Promotion, Competitive Product, and Brand Image on Credit Union Membership Decisions in West Kalimantan

Abstrak

This study examines the influence of attractive promotion, competitive product, and brand image on customer relationship quality and membership decisions in Credit Union institutions in West Kalimantan. Despite growing scholarly attention to Credit Union membership behavior, empirical evidence regarding the mediating role of Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) in community-based cooperative financial institutions, particularly within the Indonesian context, remains limited and inconsistent. Using a quantitative explanatory approach and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM-AMOS), data were collected from 150 respondents through purposive sampling. The inclusion criteria comprised registered Credit Union members aged 18 years or older across 14 regencies and municipalities in West Kalimantan Province. The results indicate that brand image significantly influences customer relationship quality (p = 0.025), whereas attractive promotion and competitive product do not exert significant effects. Likewise, none of the three independent variables has a significant direct effect on membership decisions. Customer relationship quality was found to fully mediate the relationship between brand image and membership decisions. This study contributes to the literature by demonstrating that, in rural community-based cooperative financial institutions, the relationship between marketing stimuli and membership decisions is primarily relational rather than transactional, thereby extending Signaling Theory and the Commitment–Trust Theory of Relationship Marketing within the context of cooperative finance. Overall, these findings suggest that relational and community-based factors play a more influential role than transactional marketing stimuli in shaping membership decisions in Credit Union institutions in West Kalimantan, where trust, commitment, and shared values appear to exert greater influence than promotional activities and product competitiveness.