You Can Do it! Or Can We? Personal Pronouns and Their Impact on Consumer Goal Pursuit
(A2024-118912)

AUTHORS

Sebastian Sadowski, Radboud University Nijmegen; Enny Das, Radboud University Nijmegen

ABSTRACT

We explore the impact of personal pronouns (you vs. we) in marketing communication of services that might assist consumers in their goal pursuit. Across two experiments we find that consumers with lower self-esteem perform better on a subsequent task when the pronoun ‘we’ is used, while consumers characterized by a higher level of self-esteem benefit from the usage of the pronoun ‘you’. We discuss briefly the practical implications of our findings for UX designers and marketers developing such services.