How Language Signals Persuasion: Concrete and Abstract Language in Product Referrals from Consumers and Firms

Nowadays it’s becoming more difficult to detect if a product review or referral is made by another customer (without self-interest in advertising a product), or by someone with a commercial interest (advertisement, word-of-mouth marketing). Consider raving product reviews on Amazon.com or emails with product offerings from Facebook friends. What could be sincere word of mouth could also be a marketing scheme. One way to figure out the sincerity of the communication situation is to examine the language use in product referrals. While psycholinguistics in marketing communication has received much attention from academics (for overview see Lowrey, 2007), language use in word of mouth only recently gained popularity (e.g., Moore 2012). Building on the linguistic category model (Semin & Fiedler 1988), Schellekens et al. (2010) have studied the use and effects of abstract versus concrete language in word of mouth. According to this model, an event can be described at different levels of abstraction. For example, the low fuel consumption of the Toyota Prius may be described as “the Prius use little gas” (concrete) or “the Prius is eco-friendly” (abstract). The use of abstract language describes the information as general and stable (“traitlike”), while concrete descriptions contain verifiable information on product functioning. Schellekens et al. (2010) showed that receivers of word of mouth are receptive to the use of abstract versus concrete language. They found that senders of positive (negative) word of mouth were perceived to be more positive (negative) about a brand if they use more abstract language, and that consumers who receive word of mouth are persuaded more when the sender uses more abstract language. The current studies extend prior research on language abstraction and examine the role of communication setting (commercial vs. non commercial). The studies suggest that communication setting moderates the impact of language abstraction on consumers through the activation of persuasion knowledge. Persuasion knowledge refers to consumers’ assumptions and beliefs about persuasion and marketers’ motives, strategies, and tactics (Campbell & Kirmani, 2000; Friestad & Wright, 1994).