More than Just Words. How the Communication Style Adopted by Brands Affect their Relationships with Consumers

The overall aim of this dissertation has been to examine how specific aspects of brand communication style affect the ways in which relationships between brands and consumers form and evolve. A central research question has guided this dissertation: How, when, and why does the style of communication employed by a brand affect consumer–brand relationships? I have addressed this question with three sets of empirical investigations. In the first project, I investigated how adopting an informal (vs. formal) communication style affects brand trust and demonstrated that using an informal style either have a positive or negative effect on brand trust, depending on whether consumers are familiar with the brand or not. In the second project, I investigated how humanizing a brand affects consumers’ propensity to reveal personal information to a brand. Results showed that the humanization of a brand decreases consumers’ propensity to reveal intimate information, because of higher embarrassment. In the third project, I investigated how the ease of reading a branded message affects consumer engagement with brands. Results showed that while the ease of reading a branded message increases consumer engagement with less exclusive brands, the same is not true for more exclusive one.