An Empirical Investigation on the Impact of Ethical Advertising on Building A Positive Brand Image (With Special Reference to Food and Beverage Industry)

In the field of marketing, branding has been around for centuries as a means to distinguish the goods of one producer from those of another. In building brands, there are many factors which contribute. Integrated communication plays a key role among them in this regard. Advertising is the main component of the integrated force which falls into criticisms always. Why it falls into criticisms always? Because, in the present context, public is more concerned about how business activities are done. Public do concern about the ethical aspects of the business activities. Therefore, this empirical research study attempted to search the impact of ethical advertising on building a positive brand image for food and beverages (With special reference to food and beverage in Sri Lanka). For the research study 08 objectives and 06 hypotheses were formulated. All hypotheses were proved and they say that there are positive relationships between Legality, decency, Honesty, Truthfulness and Social Responsibility of an advertisement and positive brand image of food and beverage. And further, the research proved that there is a positive relationship between occupation and legality of an advertisement and there is positive relationship between occupation and decency of an advertisement. Further, results indicated that there is a strong positive perception regarding ethical advertising. Further to state, it could be concluded that respondents who are the viewers of advertisements are highly concerned about ethics of advertising though there is no proper framework to monitor ethics in advertising in the country.