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This study aims to delve into the varying impacts of different types of emotions conveyed through retailers' review request texts on consumers' intention to write a review.

To verify the relationships between these variables, two laboratory experiments were conducted in this study.

The findings indicate that when accompanied by an objective statement, texts that evoke empathy and favor have a positive influence on consumers' inclination to write a review. Moreover, by examining the underlying mechanism, this study uncovers two interconnected mediators, namely persuasive intent and cognitive (affective) resistance, along with empathy and helping intention. Additionally, the study explores the moderating role of customer satisfaction with the product, shedding light on the contextual factors that influence the effects of emotional cues in review texts.

This research contributes to the literature and practice by focusing on the process of retailers' generating online reviews. This is one of the first studies to systematically examine the effects of emotional text in retailers' review request on consumers' reviewing intention from the perspective of emotional evocation. The experimental findings and the underlying mechanisms emphasize the impact of different types of emotions in retailers' review requests texts on consumers' reviewing intentions. It can help retailers better understand the psychological reactions of consumers when they ask reviews, which provide theoretical support for retailers to design more reasonable asking texts.

The purpose of the study is to explore the suitability of social media influencers (SMIs) for communicating public health messages via social media platforms. The study identifies key persuasive communication components that influence individuals' attitudes and, subsequently, intentions to follow health-related information shared by SMIs.

Qualitative interviews with healthcare workers and interactions with 332 active social media users via structured online questionnaires were used for data collection. Structural equation modelling was used to analyse responses.

Results indicate that SMIs' credibility, SMI–individual homophily and quality of information shared by the SMI are the significant factors determining individuals' attitudes towards the information received. Furthermore, the individual's attitude significantly impacts their intention to follow information shared by the SMI. The study thus verifies the mediating role of attitude in persuasive communication.

The current study can serve as a foundation for future work to examine the suitability of SMIs for tasks other than marketing.

The study provides insights for planning and implementing SMI-sourced communication in the public health context. The study enhances the understanding of the tested relationships and thereby increases scholars' and practitioners' ability to leverage SMIs for health-related communication.

Whilst SMIs are attracting increasing attention in consumer markets, the study suggests that they can be used in public health communication. Considering the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) situation, the empirical study provides insights into SMIs' role in persuasive public health communication amid a health crisis.

The peer review history for the article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-01-2021-0012

It is believed that the effectiveness of public service announcements (PSAs) in persuading recipients to engage in the advocated behavior may be influenced by the content of PSAs, the recipient and the context in which the recipient is exposed to the PSA. The purpose of this study is to illustrate the persuasive process of PSAs with respect to these three aspects. Specifically, how the normative appeals used in PSA, affective priming and self-construals of recipients influence the recipients' behavioral intention is investigated.

Between-subject experiments were conducted to collect data. The proposed hypotheses were verified by analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Process macro.

Results show that participants with sad emotional experiences exhibit significantly higher behavioral intention after exposure to PSA compared to those with joy primed. However, the difference in behavioral intention between participants with guilt and neutral emotional experiences was insignificant. Concerning normative appeals, descriptive norms are more persuasive than injunctive norms. In addition, participants' self-construals moderate the relationship between normative appeals and behavioral intention.

First, this study selected a group of college students as participants and used “Empty Your Plate” campaign as stimulus. Future research should test this mechanism with different samples. Second, this study only tested the effect of print advertising. Future research may examine whether these findings still work with advertisement in different formats. Moreover, future research should investigate the impact of priming guilt that is related to the PSA themes on PSAs' persuasive outcomes. Finally, this study only explored the moderating role of self-construals. Other personal traits were not investigated in current study need to be further explored.

The findings of this study provide a more comprehensive understanding of the factors that influence the effectiveness of PSA and have practical implications for PSA practitioners. Firstly, descriptive norms can be used more frequently to improve the effectiveness of PSAs. Secondly, negative emotion exerts a positive influence on persuasive outcomes, so PSA practitioners can arrange media planning more rationally. Furthermore, they can adapt their normative appeals to the self-construal characteristics of their primary audiences to achieve their communication goals more effectively. This study reveals the effectiveness mechanism of PSA in the Chinese context, and thus meets practical needs.

This research will help improve the effectiveness of PSAs to protect the public interest and alleviate social problems by optimizing media planning strategies and increasing the willingness of viewers to change their behavior.

This study enriches theory in PSAs about persuading individuals to engage in prosocial behaviors and provides evidence from China that is rarely seen. In addition, this study contributes to optimizing PSA practice by restoring the actual PSA delivery context in the experimental situation.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how language (choice) in CSR reports of leading oil companies in Nigeria is used to portray an image of “responsible organisation”.

This paper draws insights from communication studies (persuasion theory) and critical discourse analysis (CDA) studies to discursively unpack all those subtle and visible, yet equally invisible, linguistic strategies (micro-level elements): wording (single words), phrases and chains of words (clauses/sentences). These linguistic strategies (micro-level elements) proxy organisational discourses (meso-level elements), which are reflective of wider social practices (macro-level elements). The authors base the investigation on CSR reports of six leading oil companies in Nigeria from 2009 to 2012.

The findings of this study reveal that (leading) Nigerian oil companies linguistically use CSR reports to persuasively construct and portray the image of “responsible organisation” in the eyes of wider stakeholders (the communities) despite serious criticism of their corporate (ir) responsibility.

As opposed to the previous content analysis based studies, this paper contributes to the emerging stream of CDA studies on CSR reporting by providing a finer-grained linguistic analytical schema couched in Fairclough’s (2003) approach to CDA (and persuasion theory). This helps to unravel how persuasive language/discourse of responsible organisation is enacted and reproduced. The authors thus respond to the calls for theoretical plurality in CSR reporting research by introducing persuasion theory from communication studies literature which has hitherto been rarely applied.

This study aims to investigate the potential positive effects of cause-related marketing (CRM) campaigns that show evidence of commitment to espoused causes. It examines whether consumers respond positively when a CRM campaign promises to deliver proof of the espoused cause.

This study adopted the grounded theory approach to conceptualize the promised impact evidence construct. A promised impact evidence scale was developed and validated using robust qualitative and quantitative methods, including item response theory estimates.

The study provides evidence for promised impact evidence as a reflective second-order latent construct. The promised impact evidence scale demonstrates strong internal consistency, reliability and validity. In addition, this study posits that promised impact evidence is an antecedent of advertising trust, purchase intention, advertising credibility and persuasive and selling intent.

This study positioned the promised impact evidence scale against the theoretical underpinnings of the persuasion knowledge model. Specifically, this scale contributes to existing knowledge because it applies the persuasion knowledge model in CRM campaigns by adopting an acceptance focus, as opposed to the rejection focus used in developing persuasion knowledge model scales.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of the type of disclosure used by social media influencers on consumer evaluations of influencer transparency, product performance expectations and how those factors ultimately influence purchase intentions.

An experiment was conducted with 321 participants recruited from MTurk to test a moderated serial-mediation model.

The results indicate that when consumers become cognizant that an influencer’s branded promotional post may have been motivated by an underlying financial relationship, they evaluate the influencer as significantly less transparent if a more ambiguous disclosure is used relative to a clearer disclosure. Transparency perceptions of the influencer impact consumers’ perceptions of product efficacy as well as purchase intentions.

Social media influencers are rapidly emerging as a popular marketing tool for brand managers, but consumer response to this form of promotion is not well understood. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to investigate how the type of endorsement disclosure used by a social media influencer impacts consumer perception of influencer transparency, product efficacy and purchase intentions. Further, this research demonstrates the applicability of the persuasion knowledge model in the domain of influencer marketing.

The purpose of this study is to explore the effect of personalization of advertising and adding an advertising cue to advertisements on Facebook, on 9-to-13-year-old children’s awareness of selling intent, attitude towards the advertisement (Aad) and word-of-mouth (WOM) intention.

A 2 (personalized ad vs non-personalized ad) × 2 (advertising cue vs no advertising cue) between-subjects design was tested among 167 Belgian children aged 9-13 by means of an in-class online experiment.

Personalization combined with an advertising cue increases the awareness of selling intent but influences neither Aad nor WOM intention. Awareness of selling intent does not affect WOM intention. Personalization does not increase Aad. Aad has a positive effect on WOM intention.

Implementing a clear advertising cue enhances children’s awareness of selling intent of personalized advertising but does not affect behavioral intention. Public policy, the advertising community and the educational system should take these insights into account when developing regulations, ethical advertisements and educational packages to improve children’s understanding and responses to contemporary advertising formats.

The study is the first one to investigate the joint effect of advertising personalization and an advertising cue on awareness of selling intent and on evaluative and behavioral responses of children. Additionally, the role of Aad and awareness of selling intent for the development of WOM intention is explored.

The purpose of this paper is to explore advergaming to identify how users respond to characters in terms of forming brand trust and purchase intentions. The study shows that users will tend to trust brands when characters are congruent with product type and trust propensity.

In a 2×2×2 factorial design, the character presence/absence condition and product type (high vs low involvement) are between-subject, manipulated and dichotomous variables. Trust propensity is a measured, continuous variable.

Findings indicate that character presence contributes to brand trust, leading to higher purchase intentions. Character presence is more effective for promoting products of low involvement; character absence is more effective for promoting products of high involvement. Moreover, in the low-involvement product condition, consumers who have low-trust propensity are more persuaded by characters. In the high-involvement product condition, consumers who have high or low-trust propensity respond similarly to both character presence and absence.

Although characters potentially affect how gamers react to online gaming, surprisingly few studies have attempted to identify how the characters and their interactions influence consumers’ emotions and behaviors in advergaming contexts. The current study fills the gap by focusing on the effects of characters and the interactions among other influences related to characters. This study makes new theoretical and practical contributions to the literature by showing that brand trust plays a mediating role and demonstrates that game characters can stimulate purchase intentions more persuasively depending on gamers’ trust propensity and involvement in the advertised products. The findings contribute to theory regarding congruency effects of game characters and the theory of brand trust.

This paper argues that it is possible to make a scientific analysis of the process of persuasion as a function of the language used in any social interaction rather than merely the context in which that interaction takes place. In other words, persuasion is a rhetorical as much as a sociolinguistic phenomenon and persuasive language in itself constitutes a distinct register or style of speech.

This study is concerned with the perlocutionary force of emotional strategies in entrepreneurship discourse. The purpose of this paper is to determine to what extent, and under what circumstances, emotional appeals may be effective to convince the conversational partner in entrepreneurship discourse.

To examine the interaction between rational and emotional appeals this paper analyses a corpus formed by several examples of the “elevator pitch” genre, which have been taken from a TV programme called Tu Oportunidad (Your Chance), the Spanish counterpart of the British Dragon’s Den and the American Shark Tank. Using the information gathered in the discursive analysis of the corpus, the paper establishes a template that identifies the main rational and emotional aspects that characterize the entrepreneurial pitch. In a second stage of the research, the template is used to conduct a quantitative analysis of the persuasive influence of rational and emotional aspects.

The results of the qualitative and quantitative research show that there is a clear correlation between the propensity to finance entrepreneurial ventures and the presence of rational aspects in the entrepreneurial pitch. The lack of rational arguments determines the failure of the entrepreneur’s efforts to be persuasive, regardless of the emotional appeals that are introduced into the pitch. Emotional appeals prove to be useful to reinforce rational arguments but they are not sufficiently persuasive on their own.

The paper offers insight into the criteria that investors take into account in order to evaluate entrepreneurial projects, as well as on the strategies that entrepreneurs should develop to build a successful business pitch.