The influence of green brand “wordsmithing” on consumers' positive emotions: a mixed analysis before and after public health emergencies

Purpose This study explores how green brands use pun rhetoric strategies to influence consumers' positive emotions before and after public health emergencies, highlighting the moderating role of semantic situations (“Present” vs “Future”) in interactive marketing. Design/methodology/approach To extract topic sentiment patterns from Chinese social media content, a mixed-methods approach, combining BERTopic and SnowNLP, is employed. An empirical study is then conducted to examine how pun rhetoric strategies influence consumers' positive emotions in different semantic situations. Findings The findings indicate that the green brand pun rhetoric strategy significantly enhances consumers' positive emotional responses, with the effect being more pronounced in future semantic situations and diminished in present semantic situations. Originality/value This study extends the application of green brand rhetoric strategies into the realm of interactive marketing, broadening the theoretical scope of benign violation theory within green communication contexts. Furthermore, it introduces semantic situations as a moderating mechanism and proposes a “rhetoric strategy–semantic situation” framework to elucidate how green brands can shape consumer emotions. These contributions provide new theoretical insights and actionable guidance for optimizing green brand communication strategies.