Abstract
Customers process persuasive verbal messages through analytical or narrative routes. Extant marketing research offers limited findings regarding the relative effectiveness of different communication antecedents to these routes; neither does it sufficiently specify if and how communication modalities (written vs. audio) and product/service type (hedonic vs. utilitarian) moderate their impact. To address this gap, the current article presents the results of a multimethod investigation. With a meta-analysis, Study 1 establishes the differential effects of antecedents on analytical and narrative processing and the moderating roles of both modality and product/service type. Study 2 gathers the expectations of marketing professionals to provide a comparison with the meta-analytic findings, highlighting areas of misalignment and a relevant managerial question pertaining to the effects of blended analytical–narrative messages. Study 3 addresses this relevant question with an experimental approach. The combined results offer novel insights into verbal persuasion and suggest several directions for research.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science |
| Early online date | 20 Mar 2025 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 20 Mar 2025 |
Data Availability Statement
Meta-analytic and experimental data, and the associated code, are available from the authors upon request.Funding
No funding was received for conducting this study.
Keywords
- Analytical processing
- Marketing communications
- Meta-analysis
- Multimethod
- Narrative processing
- Persuasion
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Business and International Management
- Economics and Econometrics
- Marketing