Wisdom from words: The psychology of consumer language

Berger, Jonah; Packard, Grant

doi:10.1002/arcp.1085

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 135 publications

(194 reference statements)

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“…Prior research has examined how increasing the strength of a brand's message through the words used or actions described can lead to increased perceptions of stance authenticity (e.g., Windscheid et al, 2016). For example, on the messaging side, sensitive disclosures by brands can be perceived as more authentic (e.g., Jiang et al, 2022), and the use of personal pronouns can signal the desire for close relationships with customers (e.g., Berger & Packard, 2023). On the action side, describing concrete steps has been shown to be perceived as authentic in pursuit of higher‐order values, such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions or increasing the number of women on executive boards (e.g., Matsumura et al, 2014; Windscheid et al, 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speedy activists: How firm response time to sociopolitical events influences consumer behavior

et al. 2023

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Organizations face growing pressure from their consumers and stakeholders to take public stances on sociopolitical issues. However, many are hesitant to do so lest they make missteps, promises they cannot keep, appear inauthentic, or alienate consumers, employees, or other stakeholders. Here we investigate consumers' impressions of firms that respond quickly or slowly to sociopolitical events. Using data scraped from Instagram and three online experiments (N = 2452), we find that consumers express more positive sentiment and greater purchasing intentions toward firms that react more quickly to sociopolitical issues. Unlike other types of public firm decision making such as product launch, where careful deliberation can be appreciated, consumers treat firm response time to sociopolitical events as an informative cue of the firm's authentic commitment to the issue. We identify an important boundary condition of this main effect: speedy responses bring limited benefits when the issue is highly divisive along political lines. Our findings bridge extant research on brand activism and communication, and offer practical advice for firms.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speedy activists: How firm response time to sociopolitical events influences consumer behavior

et al. 2023

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“…Language patterns offer a window into a range of social and psychological processes. Early social scientific evidence argued that words offered rich accounts of peoples' thoughts and feelings (Allport, 1942; Berger, 2023; Berger & Packard, 2023; Freud, 1915; Weiner & Mehrabian, 1968), which could then be used to model their internal states. In marketing, analyses of language patterns, for example, have been instrumental to understand hedonic and utilitarian consumption (Kronrod et al, 2012a; Kronrod & Danziger, 2013), cultural products' virality and popularity (Berger & Milkman, 2012; Berger & Packard, 2018; Packard & Berger, 2020), loan defaults (Netzer et al, 2019), online review helpfulness (Lafreniere et al, 2022; Packard et al, 2023), customer satisfaction (Packard et al, 2018; Packard & Berger, 2021), market structure (Netzer et al, 2012), and consumer emotionality (Rocklage et al, 2021a, 2021b).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

PassivePy: A tool to automatically identify passive voice in big text data

2023

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The academic study of grammatical voice (e.g., active and passive voice) has a long history in the social sciences. It has been examined in relation to psychological distance, attribution, credibility, and deception. Most evaluations of passive voice are experimental or small‐scale field studies, however, and perhaps one reason for its lack of adoption is the difficulty associated with obtaining valid, reliable, and replicable results through automated means. We introduce an automated tool to identify passive voice from large‐scale text data, PassivePy, a Python package (readymade website: https://passivepy.streamlit.app/). This package achieves 98% agreement with human‐coded data for grammatical voice as revealed in two large validation studies. In this paper, we discuss how PassivePy works, and present preliminary empirical evidence of how passive voice connects to various behavioral outcomes across three contexts relevant to consumer psychology: product complaints, online reviews, and charitable giving. Future research can build on this work and further explore the potential relevance of passive voice to consumer psychology and beyond.

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“…Prior research has approached the phenomenon of the emergence of new words mainly by investigating the antecedents of the diffusion of new words and content. For example, research has focused on understanding semantics within social networks (Berger and Packard 2023; Berger et al 2020; Nam, Joshi, and Kannan 2017; Ordenes et al 2017) or uncovering factors that increase the contagiousness of social media postings or recommendations (Gai and Klesse 2019; Ludwig et al 2013; Packard and Berger 2017; Schellekens, Verlegh, and Smidts 2010).…”

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confidence: 99%

Behavioral Labeling: Prompting Consumer Behavior Through Activity Tags

Fritze,

Völckner,

Melnyk

2024

Journal of Marketing

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This research introduces behavioral labeling as the use of names or tags that reflect an associated activity, and it proposes that this can induce corresponding behavior. Contrary to the common intuition that descriptions of behaviors emerge as markings for popular actions (i.e., the label is a consequence of the behavior), the authors propose that a description itself might also induce the corresponding action (i.e., the label is an antecedent of the behavior). Building on linguistic relativity theory and based on five studies conducted in the lab and field, the authors show that merely attaching a fictitious name to a behavior can induce that very behavior. The authors also explore a potential explanation for this finding by showing that a behavioral label can evoke mental imagery regarding the associated behavior, which enhances the implementation of the behavior. The results contribute to marketing theory by introducing behavioral labeling and highlighting how language can shape behaviors. Marketers can use behavioral labels to promote their offerings based on the associated behaviors, while public policymakers can use behavioral labels to encourage certain pro-social and pro-environmental behaviors.

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Wisdom from words: The psychology of consumer language

Cited by 6 publications

References 135 publications

Speedy activists: How firm response time to sociopolitical events influences consumer behavior

Speedy activists: How firm response time to sociopolitical events influences consumer behavior

PassivePy: A tool to automatically identify passive voice in big text data

Behavioral Labeling: Prompting Consumer Behavior Through Activity Tags

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