Textual Paralanguage and Its Implications for Marketing Communications

Both face-to-face communication and communication in online environments convey information beyond the actual verbal message. In a traditional face-to-face conversation, paralanguage, or the ancillary meaningand emotion-laden aspects of speech that are not actual verbal prose, gives contextual information that allows interactors to more appropriately understand the message being conveyed. In this paper, we conceptualize textual paralanguage (TPL), which we define as written manifestations of nonverbal audible, tactile, and visual elements that supplement or replace written language and that can be expressed through words, symbols, images, punctuation, demarcations, or any combination of these elements. We develop a typology of textual paralanguage using data from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. We present a conceptual framework of antecedents and consequences of brands’ use of textual paralanguage. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. A customer of Whole Foods tweets that he received a bad cupcake from the grocer, to which Whole Foods replies, “A bad cupcake?!!?! Oh No!!! I’m so sorry. *sigh* Thank you for letting us know” (Whole Foods Market, 2013). How does communication on social media affect brand perceptions? Marketers are communicating with customers using a “shorthand, digital language” (Smith, 2015), yet the nature of these communications is under-investigated. In marketing, research on linguistics has focused primarily on the effects of word choice, such as the effect of explanatory words on consumption experiences (Moore, 2012), refusal words on choice (Patrick & Hagtvedt, 2012), and vowel sounds in brand names on brand preferences (Lowrey & Shrum, 2007). We also see evidence that imperative messages (e.g., “Buy Now!”) are more effective in uncommitted consumer-brand relationships (Moore, ZemackRugar, & Fitzsimons, working paper), and assertive statements are more effective at garnering consumer compliance for hedonic products (Kronrod, Grinstein, & Wathieu, 2012). In contrast, our work focuses not on the words said, but on the way nonverbal information is conveyed in writing. As computer-mediated communication (CMC) has become more prevalent, people have evolved new ways of communicating. Electronic messages are often imbued with nonverbal cues that signal individual characteristics, attitudes, and emotions. Indeed, various researchers recognize that people adapt to the limitations of CMC by creating surrogates for missing social cues (Byron & Baldridge, 2007; Ganster, Eimler, & Krämer, 2012; Walther, 1996). The primary goal of this paper is to provide a framework for the surrogates that people are using in digital communications. We define textual paralanguage (TPL) as written manifestations of nonverbal audible, tactile, and visual elements that supplement or replace written language and that can be