How sajiao (playing cute) wins forgiveness: The effectiveness of emojis in rebuilding trust through apology

Abstract

Prior studies have found that emojis can contribute to rebuilding customers’ trust when after-sale staff apologize to them, but studies on the different types of emojis and their different levels of effectiveness in rebuilding trust are still needed. In this paper, we explore the different types and frequencies of emojis and their effectiveness in rebuilding trust based on commercial discourses. Our data are collected from conversations between after-sale staff and customers during Ali Trademanager after-sale service. We find three types of emojis frequently used when after-sale staff apologizing to customers: face-related emojis, gesture-related emojis, and object-related emojis. Moreover, face-related emojis are the most frequently used, as their nature is to express emotion and attitude. The most effective emojis are the whimper emoji and kiss emoji, which are used by after-sale staff for sajiao (literally, ‘playing cute’). On the other hand, we show that the least effective emojis are the sorry emoji and happy emoji, which are deemed insincere because they violate the quality maxim and quantity maxim in the Cooperative Principle. This paper thus contributes to understanding the nature and function of emojis in commercial communication.

Your Smiling Face is Impolite to Me: A Study of the Smiling Face Emoji in Chinese Computer-Mediated Communication

“…Instead of merely focussing on the smiling face emoji, we focus on the utterances collocated with the emoji because the emoji is always embedded in an unfolding interaction. For example, the smiling face emoji is always combined with speech acts, such as an apology (Yang, 2023). Besides, emojis have been used as illocutionary force indicators to guide the reader’s inferences about which speech act is being performed (Scott, 2022).…”

“…In this experiment, we investigate whether and in what situations the utterance with a smiling face emoji is interpreted as (im)polite. As mentioned above, the smiling face emoji might not be used in isolation and might be combined with other speech acts (Yang, 2023). As such, we predict that the smiling face emoji will influence the politeness degree of an utterance (the utterance may be polite or impolite).…”

“…Among various emojis, the smiling face emoji () is a WeChat-specific emoji which has attracted much attention. The WeChat mentioned here is a mobile text and voice messaging communication media that enables its addressers to connect with friends and family (The Author, 2023). It has a set of emojis that differ from the Unicode one registered on Emojipedia (Cui, 2022) or emojis in other platforms such as Reddit, 4chan, Tik Tok.…”

Customer engagement and intention to purchase attitudes of generation Z consumers toward emojis in digital marketing communications

“…Zhang et al (2021) state that emojis are likely to influence trust levels in social interactions and reduce the psychological distance between users. Furthermore, when combined with apology strategies, emojis play an important role in restoring trust (Yang, 2023). Research has conceptually acknowledged the relationship between trust and involvement in online platforms and purchasing (Sharma and Klein, 2020).…”

“…customer engagement. Yang (2023) states that emojis can help to rebuild customer trust, but more research on the various types of emojis and their varying levels of effectiveness in rebuilding trust is needed. Similarly, emojis encourage customers to like and share more tweets that contain one emoji (engagement), and the effect grows stronger as the number of emojis increases (McShane et al, 2021).…”