The Emotional Advertising Appeals and Brand Trust towards Commercial Banks: 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 behavior. 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.
Based on the extensive literature review, social appeal, personal appeal, humor appeals and, fear appeal were identified as main emotional appeals in their advertisements. A sample survey was conducted among 384 regular banking customers of 03 reputed private sector commercial banks by using a self-administrated questionnaire. The findings revealed that the three independent variables namely social appeals, personal appeals, and fear appeal advertisements in the banking industry has a very positive relationship towards brand trust and it was further revealed that the humor appeal advertisements is not supporting to develop the brand trust towards the commercial banks in Sri Lankan context.

Keywords: Emotional appeal advertisement, social appeal, personal appeal, humor appeal, fear appeal, brand recall and brand trust.