The Enhancing Versus Backfiring Effects of Positive Emotion in Consumer Reviews

By Matthew D. Rocklage, R. Fazio. Journal of Marketing Research, 2020

106 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Researchers, marketers, and consumers often believe that amplifying emotional content is impactful for the spread of information and purchasing decisions. However, there is little systematic investigation of when emotionality backfires. This research demonstrates when and why positive emotion can have enhancing versus backfiring effects. The authors find that reviewers who express greater positive emotion are indeed more positive toward their products, regardless of product type. In addition, expressed emotion for hedonic products has a positive impact when read by others, but this emotion backfires for utilitarian products, leading others to be less positive. The authors construct a conceptual model of these effects and show that violated expectations leading to decreased trust underlie this divergence between reviewers and readers. The effects occur in well-controlled experiments as well as computational linguistic analysis of 100,000 Amazon reviews across 500 products. Indeed, emotional reviews of utilitarian products are less likely to become popular and be displayed on the product’s front page on Amazon. This work also introduces a novel tool for quantifying natural language in marketing: the Evaluative Lexicon.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2fede391ac57ea92fc9ca85375d34311a2e69ac7

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

1. P. Briñol
2. Richard E. Petty

In Marketing

1. P. Briñol
2. Richard E. Petty
3. Lea H Dunn
4. J. Teeny
5. Thomas Allard
6. K. White
7. Jennifer J. Argo
8. Darren W. Dahl

In Sociology and Political Science

1. P. Briñol
2. Richard E. Petty
3. J. Teeny
4. Joseph J. Siev
5. Lea H Dunn
6. Thomas Allard
7. K. White
8. Zakary L. Tormala

Citations in the corpus

• A Review and Conceptual Framework for Understanding Personalized Matching Effects in Persuasion (2020, background): “Or one can match two message features, such as when hedonic (vs. utilitarian) products are described in affective (vs. cognitive) language (Rocklage & Fazio, 2020).”
• Negative Reviews, Positive Impact: Consumer Empathetic Responding to Unfair Word of Mouth (2020, background): “Finally, work by Rocklage and Fazio (2020) finds that effusive positive emotionality can increase evaluations for hedonic products but lower evaluations for utilitarian products.”