Messaging brand experience: Brand ethicality, brand trust, brand attitudes

Messaging applications (e.g. WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal-type platforms) have become high-frequency touchpoints within integrated marketing communications. This study examines how the brand experience of messaging applications translates into brand attitudes through two parallel mechanisms: perceived brand ethicality and brand trust. We theorize that ethicality and trust serve as communication signals that arise from interface-level design and governance choices, such as plain-language privacy notices, granular consent flows, visible encryption and reliability cues, and third-party assurances. Using survey data from active messaging users, we validated the measurement model via CFA and tested a parallel-mediation structure with bootstrapped indirect effects. Results indicate that messaging brand experience exerts a positive direct effect on brand attitudes and significant indirect effects through both brand ethicality and brand trust, confirming that persuasion in messaging hinges on credibility and transparency signals embedded in the journey. Robustness checks across alternative specifications support these findings. Theoretically, the paper integrates behavioural foundations of persuasion with corporate communication by reframing governance artefacts as source/message credibility cues that shape ethical inferences and risk reduction. Managerially, the results recommend making ethical and reliability signals salient within messaging flows, aligning privacy-by-default language with value propositions, and orchestrating assurance elements across channels to improve attitudes and downstream performance.