۱٫ Introduction

Purchase decisions in a business-to-business (B2B) context are often thought to be driven by rational processes. However, researchers have been calling for a greater acknowledgment of how emotions influence the behaviour of business customers (Lynch and de Chernatony, 2004). For example, researchers have emphasised the importance of emotional appeals in B2B brand communications (Lynch and de Chernatony, 2007), as such encounters are based on the emotional behaviour of individuals in organisational decision-making units (Andersen and Kumar, 2006). Advertising is one of the key channels of communication used by brands in B2B markets, and the use of emotional appeals, although widely researched in B2C contexts, has not been addressed in the context of B2B financial service markets. Some researchers have argued that emotional appeals are deemed important in creating effective advertisements, as they target the consumer’s psychological, social, and symbolic needs – focusing on prompting emotions, and bringing an affection mechanism that will motivate consumers to purchase the advertised products (Bülbül and Menon, 2010). Despite the suggested effectiveness of emotional appeals, a consensus on their suitability for advertising financial services, especially from a B2B context, has not yet been reached (Zhang et al., 2014). Researchers are still exploring its suitability for certain services (Matthes et al., 2014; Akbari, 2015). Both practitioners (Mowat, 2014) and academics alike have called for more research into the role emotions play in B2B encounters (Lynch and de Chernatony, 2007). Furthermore, very few papers have focused on the issue of emotions in advertisements targeted at business consumers. This paper has responded to these calls by carrying out two studies which have been sequentially explored in order to develop a deeper understanding of emotional appeals in UK bank B2B advertisements, as well as consumer perceptions of such appeals. Extant research has focused mainly on how emotional advertising appeals are presented in advertisements (De Pelsmacker and Geuens, 1997; Janssens and De Pelsmacker, 2005) and how effective they are in a B2C context (Bülbül and Menon, 2010; Moore and Harris, 1996). This study aims to offer a holistic approach, adding to existing knowledge about the use and effectiveness of emotional appeals in the previously neglected (especially in the UK) B2B context (Ballantyne and Aitken, 2007). This is based on the argument that emotions are, in fact, a very important part of the decision-making process amongst businesses (Culkin and Smith, 2000). In Study 1, content analysis was performed on newspaper advertisements in order to identify emotional appeals used by UK banks and this constituted the quantitative strand of the research. Next, in Study 2, semi-structured interviews with business owners were performed to elicit consumer perceptions about these appeals and produce the qualitative strand. As Creswell (2009) suggested, researchers need to make a decision on timing and pace, while carrying out different studies. Sequential timing was deemed appropriate for this research project, as the strands were carried out in two different and clearcut phases.