دانلود رایگان مقاله تاثیر انتزاع زبان بر متقاعد کردن ارجاع خدمات

abstract

Due to the inherent risk and uncertainty characterizing pre-purchase service evaluation, consumers tend to rely on referrals from other consumers who already have experiences with that service. Thus, companies are eager to stimulate such referrals and improve their effectiveness. To this end, this research investigates how consumers' linguistic framing of service recommendations influences recipients' attitudes and behavioral intentions. Specifically, this study focuses on one key dimension of language—its abstractness (vs. concreteness)—and hypothesizes that the effect of language abstractness on referral persuasiveness depends on recipients' prior knowledge about the service in question. The results of two experiments in the context of financial and medical services demonstrate that abstract language is more effective than concrete language for recipients with high prior knowledge. Moreover, this research shows that recipients' engagement in mental imagery processing is that makes abstract language more effective for those with high prior knowledge. This articles ends with a discussion of the study's implications for academic research, social communication and service management, along with its limitations and future research directions.

6. General discussion

Because services entail relatively high risk and uncertainty, consumers tend to consider referrals from other people who have prior experience with a service as particularly reliable and worthwhile information sources. However, a need to better understand when and why service referrals are more influential on recipients' attitudes and behaviors seems to exist. To this end, the present research investigates the effects of a message-related factor (the use of abstract vs. concrete language by the person recommending a service) and a recipient-related factor (recipients' high vs. low prior knowledge about the service in question) on the persuasiveness of referrals people provide in online settings. The results of two experiments show that whether an abstract versus a concrete language is more likely to affect recipients' attitudes and behavioral intentions depends on recipients' prior knowledge. Moreover, this work sheds light on the underlying mechanism of those effects, demonstrating that high prior knowledge enables referral recipients to engage in mental imagery processing, thereby extracting the full meaning of the abstract message.