Emotions and language in advertising

It is widely acknowledged that advertisers employ primarily two types of persuasion strategies—rational vs. emotional—to persuade consumers to buy their products. While a rational appeal is driven by information processing by the conscious mind, in contrast, an emotional appeal is propelled by the unconscious mind or gut‐feeling(s), which has its own rewards and risks. The main goals of this paper are two‐fold: (1) to present a mechanism of encoding and decoding emotions rooted in the language; and (2) to identify linguistic markers and strategies of an emotional ad. In addition to imagery, the role of language in emotional advertising is undisputed. A linguistic analysis of monolingual as well as bilingual/multilingual ads is performed to show how language regulates desired emotional effects, identities, and appeals.