Can You Make a Difference? The Use of (In)Formal Address Pronouns in Advertisement Slogans

Abstract

Directly addressing the consumer in advertisements has a positive impact on their perception of the product. Dutch, however, makes a distinction between a formal and an informal second person pronoun. If and how this distinction impacts consumers’ appreciation in and beyond advertising has not received much attention. Quantifying consumers’ appreciation in terms of the attitude toward the advertisement and toward the product, purchase intention, and price estimation, we show experimentally that customers’ attitude toward the advertisement receives higher scores when the informal pronoun is used than when its formal counterpart is.

Keywords:

• Advertising
• second person pronouns
• experiment
• persuasion
• involvement

Acknowledgements

This publication is part of the project ‘Processing pronouns of address: The impact of being addressed with a polite or an informal pronoun’ with project number 406.20.TW.011 of the research programme Open Competition SSH, financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer and the editor for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this article. We thank Charlotte van den Broek and Fieke Litjens for designing part of the stimuli and collecting part of the data.

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in a Radboud Data Repository at https://doi.org/10.34973/jwwq-p517.

Notes

1 Note that four experimental items and two filler items advertise services rather than products. For the purposes of this paper we abstract away from this difference and treat services as products.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) under grant number 406.20.TW.011.