IMPROVING MARKETING STRATEGIES AS A KEY FACTOR IN ENHANCING THE COMPETITIVENESS OF COMMERCIAL BANKS

This article examines marketing strategy improvement as a key internal factor in strengthening the competitiveness of commercial banks, combining a review of services-marketing and bank-marketing theory with an empirical analysis of Uzbekistan’s banking market. The marketing-mix, relationship-marketing, service-quality and brand-equity literature is systematized to build a conceptual view of how marketing strategy translates into bank competitiveness, and a seven-stage model for improving the marketing-strategy mechanism of commercial banks is proposed. Using data from the Central Bank of the Republic of Uzbekistan, the Asian Development Bank, international award and ranking programs and recent industry research, the article analyses the expansion of digital marketing and distribution channels in Uzbekistan’s banking sector and compares the customer-base growth of digital-native banking platforms with the market average. The results show that the share of adults using digital payment channels in Uzbekistan rose from 39 percent in 2021 to about 72 percent in 2025, while leading digital-native banking platforms expanded their customer base considerably faster than the system average: ANORBANK’s customer base grew by 46 percent in a single year to 3.55 million, and TBC Uzbekistan’s user base rose from 13.2 million in December 2023 to 16.9 million in September 2024. At the same time, international evidence indicates that most retail banks still struggle to convert marketing and personalization investment into a consistently positive customer experience, with only about a quarter of retail-banking customers worldwide reporting a fully satisfactory service interaction. Based on these findings, practical recommendations are formulated for improving the marketing-strategy mechanism of commercial banks in Uzbekistan.