The role of attitude towards mascot advertisements on brand trust

In an increasingly competitive environment, brands carry out various promotional activitiesin order to attract the attention of consumers and to ensure their trust in the brand. It is seen that brands tend to frequently include the use of mascots in their advertising activities, as individuals show more interest in the elements they see and attract their attention. Brand mascots, which can be designed with different features by taking into account the product qualities, can also exhibit unusual behaviors such as being able to fly, do magic, run fast, change shape, destroy the existing or create the nonexistent. Thus, it helps to support the high quality, unique, strong promise of the promoted product. The brand mascot, which is one of the physical components of the brand identity such as the brand's logo, color, slogan and packaging, offers consumers clues about the product and the brand. Brand mascots, which can be defined as characteristic figures as an important element of brand identity, can be thought of as a tool that tells consumers who the brand is. In this context, as a result of the research carried out in this study, which aims to reveal the role of the attitude towards advertisements containing mascots on brand trust, it has been tried to reveal whether the mascots used in advertisements have an effect on brand trust. The aim of this research is to reveal whether consumers' attitudes towards advertisements containing brand mascots have an effect on brand trust. In this context, in this study, the attitudes of consumers towards Anthromorphic mascot, Zoomorphic mascot and Terramorphic mascots in advertisements. This study was conducted to reveal consumers' perceptions of brand trust towards advertisements using mascots. The survey method was used to collect data in the research. The questionnaire used in the research consists of 4 parts. In the first part of the survey, questions were asked to measure the reliability and intention dimensions of the brand trust of the participants in YapıKredi, Ing Bank, QNB Finansbank banks. As a result of the linear regression analyzes carried out to reveal whether the attitudes of the participants towards bank advertisements containing brand mascots have an effect on the dimensions of brand trust, reliability and intention, it was seen that the attitudes of the participants towards the advertisement containing the mascot had an effect on both dimensions. In other words, it is seen that the fact that the participants find the advertisements with the mascot of the bank brand attractive in the advertisements of the bank, find them creative, like these advertisements and think that these advertisements are good, increase the level of trust in the bank brands. In other words, it is seen that their thoughts that the bank will meet their expectations positively affect their trust in the bank and their thoughts that the bank will satisfy them.