Abstract Or Concrete? The Influence Of Advertising Linguistic Style On Persuasion

Advertisement marketing has always been the focus of marketers and marketing scholars.Advertisement mainly transmits product information to consumers through advertising language and therefore influences consumer cognition.There is no unified classification of advertising language because of the different standards.In recent years,abstract advertising linguistic style which in contrast to concrete advertising linguistic style that mainly emphasizing the details and providing clear information of product,is gradually attracting the attention of the public.Abstract advertising language is vaguer,focusing on describing the overall characteristics of the product,and building a rich sense of pictures.In academic field,past studies either directly compared these two kinds of advertising linguistic styles or explored their effectiveness in combination with product types and brand images.However,there is little research on the internal mechanism of these two types of advertising language affecting the effect of advertising persuasion.Then,how will the abstract advertising language and the concrete advertising language affect consumers’ feelings? And how should enterprises use these two types of advertising linguistic styles to maximize the effect of advertising persuasion?These are the main questions that this study will focus on.From the perspective of advertising linguistic style,this paper divides the types of advertising language into abstract advertising linguistic style and concrete advertising linguistic style.Then this paper explored the dual path mechanism and the boundary of advertising language style influencing advertising persuasion through 3 experiments basing on construal level theory and processing fluency theory.To be specifically,Experiment 1 explored the different effects of abstract and concrete linguistic styles on consumers’ mental simulations.The results showed that compared with concrete advertising language,abstract advertising language can stimulate consumers’ outcome simulation more.However,compared with abstract advertising language,concrete advertising language can better stimulate the process simulation of consumers.Experiments 2 and 3 focused on consumers’ personal characteristics and explored the downstream influence of advertising language on advertising persuasion in actual marketing situations.Among them,Experiment 2 explored the boundary effect of consumers’ thinking style.The results showed that for consumers with global thinking style,abstract advertising language will stimulate outcome simulation more,and thus generating better advertising persuasion.However,for consumers with local thinking style,concrete advertising language will lead to higher process simulation,which in turn will generate better advertising persuasion.Experiment 3 continued to explore the influence of another important consumer’s characteristics—— consumers’ power state,and conducted an empirical study on the interaction between the consumer’s power state and the type of advertising linguistic style on advertising persuasion.The results showed that for consumers with high power,abstract advertising language can stimulate outcome simulation more,and thus generating better advertising persuasion.For consumers with low power,concrete advertising language will lead to higher process simulation,and thus generating better advertising persuasion.On the theoretical level,this paper enriches the relevant research in the field of advertising language and expands the research literature of advertising marketing;on the practical level,it also provides certain reference and guidance for enterprises to rationally design and construct advertising language and formulate effective advertising marketing strategies.