Luxury Content Becoming Viral Online: The Positive Role of Lexical Sophistication

• Published in: Advances in Consumer Research Vol. 50; pp. 170 - 171
• Main Authors: Qiu, Zitian, Morhart, Felicitas, Lnaz, Andreas, Shapira, Daniel
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: Urbana Association for Consumer Research 01.01.2022
• Subjects: Brands; Communication; Luxuries; Social networks; New York; United States > US
• ISSN: 0098-9258

An analysis of 300,000+ brand-created tweets reveals that luxury brands' content using more sophisticated (vs. simple) words is more likely to be shared. This is because lexically sophisticated content is in line with high-status communication styles, thus enabling luxury brands' audiences to signal superior status by sharing such content online. Nowadays, most well-known luxury brands are active on social media. How to increase content virality while maintaining a highend brand image has become the focal point of contemporary luxury branders. Pancer et al. (2019) found that content using simple (vs. complex) words is more likely to be shared online. However, we propose such a strategy may not be suitable for luxury brands. Keeping a psychological distance from the mass is a critical strategy for luxury branding (Kapferer and Bastien 2012). Sophisticated (vs. simple) words that are used less in daily contexts could reduce content's processing fluency, and hence, enlarge the psychological distance between a brand and its audiences (see Construal Level Theory; Alter and Oppenheimer 2008). Thus, sophisticated wording should align with luxury brands' communication styles. Besides, content-sharing behavior can be seen as a form of social interaction. Driven by impression management motives (Goffman 1959), users should prefer sharing content with more status signaling qualities. For example, people like to discuss high-status matters to signal that they belong to the elite (Berger 2014). Taken together, we predict that users prefer sharing lexically sophisticated content that is created by luxury brands (H1a) vs. non-luxury brands (H1b), because sophisticated luxury-branded content is more aligned with high-status brands' communication style (H2a), and thus, has more status signaling qualities (H2b). Studies 1-2 were conducted by analyzing a dataset from the global watch industry containing 318,775 tweets and 119,593 images by 221 brands. The purpose of Study 1 was to explore how different levels of lexical sophistication would impact the virality of luxury versus non-luxury brands' content. We used the word's usage frequency cross-checked with existing frequency-checking corpora (e.g., Corpus of Contemporary American English) as a proxy for the sophistication level (Kyle, Crossley and Berger 2018). Then, we took the inverse of average word frequency to quantify each tweet's sophistication level and used the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count 2022 (Boyd et al., 2022) and Google Cloud Vision API to capture each tweet's text- and image-specific features. Regression results revealed that increased lexical sophistication was positively correlated with the sharing volume of luxury brands' content (e.g., β = .016, p < .05; We determined a brand's status based on Deloitte's watch industry report; Deloitte 2021), but negatively correlated with the sharing volume of affordable (e.g., β = -.033, p < .005) and premium brands' content (e.g., β = -.041, p < .001). By extension, Study 2 was designed to show that sophisticated wording style is more status- relevant. Thus, we used a brand's (median) product price as the proxy for a brand's status (Lee 2021), regressed the natural log of the median price of each brand on the tweet's lexical sophistication level, and found that lexical sophistication was positively correlated with brand status (e.g., β = .12, p < .001). To verify the main effect and the mediation path, we conducted Study 3, a one-factor experiment (lexical sophistication: unsophisticated vs. sophisticated) with a between-subject design. 153 MTurkers (45% female, Mage = 33.5) were randomly assigned to read either a sophisticated or unsophisticated post. After reading, participants rated their intention of sharing the post on social media (scale adapted from Pancer et al., 2019), the content's conformity to high-status communication norms (scale adapted from Bellezza, Gino and Keinan 2014), and the content's status signaling qualities (scale adapted from Locke, 2003). ANOVA results showed significant differences between conditions on sharing intention (F (1, 151) = 10.22, p < .005), conformity to high-status communication norms (F (1, 151) = 184.66, p < .001), and status signaling qualities (F (1, 151) = 18.13, p < .001). Next, we used Hayes's (2017) Model 6 to test the serial mediation model and found evidence of full mediation. To conclude, our research explores the positive effects of lexical sophistication on the virality of luxury brands' content and sheds light on the mechanism behind the effect. Theoretically, this paper makes several contributions. First, some previously established virality-driving factors should be carefully revisited for high-status brands' digital marketing practices. Second, we provide empirical evidence that manifests people share high-status content to signal superior statuses. Third, we add to those studies (e.g., Pocheptsova, Labroo and Dhar 2010) that show the positive effects of processing disfluency. Managerially, luxury brands could create sophisticated social media content to ensure content virality while maintaining the brand's prestige.