(I'm) Happy to Help (You): The Impact of Personal Pronoun Use in Customer–Firm Interactions
By Grant Packard, Sarah G. Moore, Brent McFerran. Journal of Marketing Research, 2018
144 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In responding to customer questions or complaints, should marketing agents linguistically “put the customer first” by using certain personal pronouns? Customer orientation theory, managerial literature, and surveys of managers, customer service representatives, and consumers suggest that firm agents should emphasize how “we” (the firm) serve “you” (the customer), while de-emphasizing “I” (the agent) in these customer–firm interactions. The authors find evidence of this language pattern in use at over 40 firms. However, they theorize and demonstrate that these personal pronoun emphases are often suboptimal. Five studies using lab experiments and field data reveal that firm agents who refer to themselves using “I” rather than “we” pronouns increase customers’ perceptions that the agent feels and acts on their behalf. In turn, these positive perceptions of empathy and agency lead to increased customer satisfaction, purchase intentions, and purchase behavior. Furthermore, the authors find that customer-referencing “you” pronouns have little impact on these outcomes and can sometimes have negative consequences. These findings enhance understanding of how, when, and why language use affects social perception and behavior and provide valuable insights for marketers.
Subfields: Language and Linguistics, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c0a07ca20fa30a7466bd38e9dfbb50aca646ff63
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In Language and Linguistics
In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management
In Sociology and Political Science
- Grant Packard
- Jonah A. Berger
- Yanfen You
- Lili Wang
- Xiaoyan Deng
- Xiaojing Yang
- Andrew T. Stephen
- David A. Hirshleifer
Citations in the corpus
- How Concrete Language Shapes Customer Satisfaction (2020, background): “Additional examples for managers are offered in Table 4. employee assessment and development, text analysis can be used to evaluate employee concreteness in relation to other important language features (e.g., negativity, Ordenes et al. 2014; pronouns, Packard et al. 2018).”
- When and Why Saying “Thank You” Is Better Than Saying “Sorry” in Redressing Service Failures: The Role of Self-Esteem (2020, background): “Recent work on linguistic framing (e.g., Cheema and Patrick 2008; Packard, Moore, and McFerran 2018; Patrick and Hagtvedt 2012) suggests that subtle changes in expressions can elicit distinct psychological feedback from consumers.”