Trust Me, I'm a Banker: Analysing the Issue of Trust between Banks, Media and Customers

The aim of this research project is to investigate the hegemonic and posthegemonic arrangement regarding trust and power in order to establish whether the concept of ‘trust’
between banks, customers and the media is sustainable. This research challenges the notion that customers are losing ‘trust’ in banks by questioning the original existence of ‘trust’ and critically examining the components comprising what is seen as ‘trust’, as well as assessing the role played by the media in the process of building/destroying trust.
What the literature shows is that despite there being a body of knowledge regarding trust in various fields within business, the issue of trust in the banking sector is becoming prominent. Although trust in banking has become a popular research topic (see, for example, Devlin et al
2015), few studies interrogate the concept of trust. This research was based on an inductive qualitative approach using critical discourse analysis to analyse data collection.
The research found that there are four main components of trust that customers want in the banking sector and they are hope, expectation, belief and confidence. One can argue that trust is posthegemonic. The emotions produced from the articles are affective and it does not matter whether one has knowledge about the subject or not, affect can change opinions. The articles affected the four components of trust which led to a lack of trust from the customers towards the banks. Therefore, an argument can be made that the media influenced the public’s perceptions of banks during the financial crisis and that many of these perceptions persist to the present day. There is scope for further research. One area of research could be to test the framework of trust developed in this research. Another area could be to measure the impact of the media during the financial crisis