The Relationship between Emotional Appeal Advertisement and Brand Trust: A study in Private Sector Commercial Banks in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Advertising has become one of the most important commercial activities in the modern competitive environment. To meet the varying demands of their target consumers, advertisers commonly use rational appeal and emotional appeal in their advertising in an attempt to influence consumer behaviour. Therefore many researchers have tried to understand the association between emotional appeals and brand trust in different socio economic contexts. According to one argument, financial services organizations like banks are mainly consider rational appeals are more effective for developing their brands. However, it was noted that most of the commercial banks in Sri Lanka were highly adopted to emotional appeals than the rational appeals in their advertisements during recent years. Therefore present study attempts to examine how does emotional appeals of advertising influence on developing the brand trust among customers towards private sector commercial banks in Sri Lanka. According to literature, advertisers mainly adopted to social appeal, personal appeal, humour appeals and, fear appeal as main emotional appeals in their advertisements. Therefore, conceptual model was developed based on those emotional appeals and brand trust towards the commercial banks. The research philosophy is designed as positivism research paradigm based on deductive approach which elaborated as testing theory through observation of data. The research instrument will be a self-administrated questionnaire through emails and face to face interviews as the contact method and response format will be 7 point likert scale for all variables in the conceptual framework. Sample population will be the customers who are regularly doing transaction with the selected three private sector commercial banks.