Service That Sells — Maharlika Bank's Service-Brand Recovery

A four-round, intermediate marketing and services-management simulation set inside Maharlika Bank, a PHP 38-billion universal retail bank in Makati, Metro Manila, serving 3.4 million customers through 280 branches and 9,200 employees (5,600 customer-facing). The Q1 2026 tracker has just printed the bank's first customer-satisfaction decline in eight years — top-2-box satisfaction down from 78% to 69%, the brand-equity index from 64 to 58, and the SERVQUAL service-quality gap widened to 1.8 points, its worst ever. The board sets a binding recovery target: return satisfaction to 75% within four quarters, with a fixed PHP 600M marketing-and-service budget — or it cuts the budget and pivots to pure price competition. Below 65%, that pivot is automatic. Playing the new CMO, you work the full internal-marketing-orientation chain (Kang's research, AIM): internal service quality → front-line engagement → customer satisfaction → brand equity → marketing ROI. Round 1: diagnose the gap — decompose it by SERVQUAL dimension, decide whether it originates at the customer interface or upstream in internal service (tellers wait 4.2 days for IT and 6 days for credit against a 1-day standard), and separate the symptom (low satisfaction) from the cause (internal service failure). Round 2: build internal marketing orientation — set a resourced internal SLA, grant capped front-line empowerment for service recovery, and make internal departments want to serve their colleagues through recognition and shared scorecards, not just a mandate. Round 3: allocate the full PHP 600M across external advertising, customer-facing service investment and internal marketing, and re-set the advertised service promise (branches run 34 minutes; you can credibly reach 22). Round 4: defend the plan to the board and absorb a live shock — a viral complaint, a neobank ad blitz, or a CFO budget cut — without abandoning the service-led strategy, and name the one leading indicator you will watch. The math wires the concept's common errors so every wrong strategy measurably underperforms: 'advertising the fix' (a big campaign amplifying an undeliverable promise), treating low satisfaction as a front-line training problem, mandating SLAs with no resourcing, defending an undeliverable 15-minute promise, and ignoring the service-profit-chain lag. Over-promising and advertising-the-fix set sticky run-defining flags that cap satisfaction below the 75% target, so a blind click-through of the seeded defaults cannot win. Final KPIs track customer satisfaction (%), the service-quality gap (SERVQUAL points), the brand-equity index and marketing ROI.