The Effect of Bank Advertising on Customer Responses: The Role of Service Communications as Part of Service Quality of the Financial Services Industry.

This study investigates the impact on customer responses (cognitive and affective) of different types of bank advertisement (product and corporate). The research was conducted both in Thailand and the UK. There were two pilot studies of 40 and 20 respondents, a main study with a sample of 600 and a validation follow-up with a sample of 60. The research sample consisted of Thai bank customers, aged between 18 and 50 who watched a selection of television bank advertisements and answered questionnaires. The findings have established that there are differences between cognitive and affective responses to product and corporate bank advertisements. There was no relationship between responses and the demographic characteristics of the sample. However, the study has not established that the differences between two types of response (cognitive & affective) would necessarily influence the intention to select an institution and become its customer. Nevertheless, it is suggested that respondents tend to select an institution when they have high affective responses towards the corporate advertisement or when they have high cognitive responses towards the product advertisement. The study has contributed to knowledge in the following areas. First, the usefulness of the instrument, which was explored by others, was improved. Second, the sample size was significantly larger than most of the work encountered in the literature, which helped with a clear outcome and with the credibility of the findings. Third, the stimuli used for this research were expected to yield results close to reality because they were selected by bank advertising professionals from a portfolio of 50 actual bank advertisements. In addition, the study has contributed to establishing that there are different affective and cognitive responses to the same stimulus, which support several previous findings. Lastly, the study provides some practical contribution to decision making by advertising managers; they would be better guided on how to include cognitive or affective elements in each type of advertisement (product/service or corporate) according to the objectives to be achieved