Understanding the Attitude of Generation Z Consumers Towards Advertising Avoidance on the Internet

One of the biggest challenges faced by marketers today is to comprehend the reasons behind people’s avoidance towards advertisements worldwide, and how that can be managed. Although many researchers have explored the subject in both traditional and contemporary marketing communication mediums, there is no evidence of studies conducted in the context of Bangladeshi market, with specific concentration on Generation Z consumers. This generation constitutes a significant portion of the entire population in the country, indicating that a major share of current and potential customers belong to this age group. Intriguingly, even though they are characterized as highly tech-savvy customers, they are also more likely to avoid online advertisements, making the marketing efforts of organizations ineffective. Therefore, this study investigates the determinants that cause the Generation Z consumers in Bangladesh to avoid advertisements on the Internet. The collected data from 280 respondents were analyzed through descriptive statistics using SPSS.24, followed by confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structure equation modeling (SEM), which were performed with the help of AMOS.17 to eventually test the hypotheses developed for this study. The findings indicate goal impediment, privacy concern, ad clutter, and negative experiences are positively related to advertising avoidance online. Keywords: advertising avoidance, goal impediment, privacy concern, ad clutter, negative experience, and generation-z consumer

Assessing the Relationship between Service Quality and Customer’s Propensity to Switch Brands in the Banking Industry of Bangladesh

The significance of banks and other financial institutions is highlighted by the contribution they make to the economic development of a country. With a number of state-owned, private-owned and foreign banks in Bangladesh, it reflects the wide range of options available to the customers, indicating the presence of severe competition. Such relentless competition in the banking industry of Bangladesh has led banks to seek ways to differentiate their services in the market, ultimately aiming to satisfy customers and preventing them to switch to a competing brand. Despite the efforts, banks are constantly hounded by the challenge of customers moving to another organization in search for better products and services. As expressed by the literary work of various academicians and researchers, service quality plays a vital role in determining the possibility of customers to switch. This research therefore, aims to investigate whether the components of service quality identified by the Servqual model discourage customers’ willingness to switch to another brand. Based on the analysis of diverse literature, hypotheses were developed and in order to test those, primary data collected from 250 respondents were analyzed through SPSS. Eventually, the findings reveal that the service quality dimensions positively influence customer satisfaction, which in turn are negatively associated with customers’ brand switching intention. Furthermore, the dimensions directly, without using customer satisfaction as a mediating factor, also have negative relationship with brand switching intentions. However, in the analysis, amongst all the dimensions of service quality only one element (i.e. responsiveness) was found less significant. Keywords: service quality, customer satisfaction, and brand switching intentio