Unstructured Communication in Marketing – The Critical Role of Textual, Visual, Verbal, and Vocal Elements
(A2025-125218)

AUTHORS

Reza (Pouria) Khansari, Ivey Business School at Western University; Marcelino Chavez, University of Texas at Austin; Giovanni Luca Cascio Rizzo, University of Southern California; Abhishek Borah, Professor of Marketing, INSEAD; Kersi Antia, Ivey Business School at Western University

ABSTRACT

This session explores the significant impact of unstructured communication in marketing. Whether gleaned from companies’ corporate reports, presenters’ gestures, product discontinuation announcements, or from conversations between customers and front line employees (FLEs), unstructured data allows researchers to delve into overlooked dimensions of communication. This session provides insights into the impact of multiple communication modes on diverse marketing-salient outcomes. The included papers mine latent information available in video, audio, and text that help inform inferences made about relevant others competitors' strategies, TED Talk presenters’ effectiveness, firm’s press releases regarding product discontinuations or the perceived empathy of complaining customers and the FLEs assisting them. Each paper considers a different, albeit complementary, medium to assess how words, hand gestures, and tone respectively systematically explain competitive advantage, user engagement, stock market returns, and customer satisfaction. The first paper by Marcelino Chavez and Leigh McAlister presents a novel text-augmented indicator to identify firms’ source of competitive advantage (SCA). Chavez and McAlister find that differentiators tend to use words like “consumer, brand, advertising, and “marketing”, while cost leaders use words like “cost, liabilities, adjustments, and “obligations”. The second paper presented in this session (coauthored by Giovanni Luca Cascio Rizzo, Jonah Berger, and Mi Zhou) synthesizes a large-scale analysis of YouTube videos and controlled experiments to address the issue of whether and how speakers’ hand movements shape their audience’s engagement and purchase intention. In the third presentation, the authors explore the role of impression management strategies in mitigating negative stock market reactions to product discontinuation announcements. It analyzes how announcement-related factors (e.g., rationale, specificity, language tone) and firm characteristics (e.g., marketing capability, innovation capacity) influence investor responses. The study finds that positive motivations, clear language, and an optimistic tone in announcements can reduce market losses, though firms with higher innovation capacity paradoxically face greater penalties. In the fourth and final presentation, Khansari, Damavandi, and Antia analyze more than 29,000 voice recordings of FLEs’ interactions with customers calling into a call center to resolve their complaints. Their state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) and audio mining analyses allow them to infer empathy from both spoken words and vocal features of both parties – complaining customers and the FLEs assisting them. By offering fresh perspectives and innovative methodologies, we anticipate our proposed session to be of significant interest to academics interested in contemporary marketing strategy, digital marketing, communication, and service marketing.