Impact of Brand Crisis on Brand Avoidance with the Mediating Effect of Brand Love in Telecommunication Industry with Special Reference to Western Province, Sri Lanka

Abstract

The telecommunication industry is one of the growing platforms in service category in Sri Lanka which has marked a stable growth in previous years. Even though many branding concepts were investigated by the previous researchers in this context, brand crisis and brand avoidance behavior was not sufficiently investigated in the local context. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify the impact of brand crisis on brand avoidance with the mediating effect of brand love in the telecommunication industry referring to mobile connection subscribers in Western Province, Sri Lanka. As this study is quantitative in nature, it has used structured survey questionnaires, identifying a sample of 400 which consist of mobile connection subscribers using a multistage mix sampling method with special reference to Western Province in Sri Lanka. In terms of testing hypothesis, the researchers have followed Partial Least Square (PLS), and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). The bootstrapping results of the structural model demonstrated that brand crisis positively impacts on brand avoidance and negative relationships in between brand love and brand avoidance. Further, it has been proved that there is no any significant relationship in between brand crisis and brand love due to situational based customer reactions. Further, since the study focuses only the telecommunication industry and the western province in Sri Lanka, generalization of findings gets framed only for the given context and the boundary.