Look Who’s Talking: Linguistic Signaling in C2C and B2C Communication

Consumers and firms communicate their intentions through a variety of language uses. Instances of such language uses may be pronoun use (‘I/we will consider your complaint’), negation (‘It wasn’t expensive’), figurative language (‘It’s the Ferrari of vacuum cleaners’), or language abstraction (‘That perfume smells fresh/is nice’). Recently emerging work on linguistic behavior in marketing (Kronrod, Grinstein and Wathieu 2012a, 2012b; Moore 2012; Patrick and Hagvedt, 2010; Schellekens, Verlegh and Smidts 2010) has directed a spotlight to questions of language use and its effect in marketing communication. The current session is, figuratively speaking, a ray of this spot light. In this session we intend to make a difference, bringing a new breeze of research to the attention of our research community. We will present works, all of which investigate phenomena in marketing linguistics, hoping the session will stimulate wide discussion of consumers’ and firms’ talk and what effects it has. The papers in this session are all closely tied around language use of consumers and firms. All four deal with the question: how do variations in language use affect consumers?