Emotional Expressions and Brand Status

This project investigates emotionality by brands on social media. First, a field data set of over 200,000 text and images posts by brands across two major platforms is analyzed. Using recent automated text analysis (Study 1a) and computer vision methods (Studies 1b and 1c), the author provides initial documentation of a negative relationship between brand emotionality and status. Exploring this relationship further, in Studies 2, 3, and 4, the author finds that brands can leverage this association, reducing emotionality in brand communications to increase perceived brand status. This strategy is effective because reduced emotionality is associated with high-status communication norms, which evoke high-status reference groups. This finding is moderated by the status context of the brand (Study 2) and the product type (Study 4).