Using Natural Language Processing to Investigate the Role of Syntactic Structure in Persuasive Marketing Communication

The use of language is ubiquitous in any marketing communication such as advertisements or product descriptions, and the problem - how to formulate marketing communications so that they are persuasive - is a decision problem most marketers face. We propose a novel natural language processing (NLP) approach to investigate the impact of syntax in marketing communications. Our approach shows that the syntactic structure of the language used in a message impacts its persuasiveness. Using a dataset of 134 debates with 129,480 sentences, we show that the syntactic structure of a message is predictive of its persuasiveness. We propose an NLP approach to capture syntactic structure. This allows us to identify syntactic elements that directly impact the persuasiveness of a communication. We demonstrate how practitioners can use our method to develop persuasive marketing communications. In a lab experiment, we show that a marketing message designed according to our findings is more successful in changing consumer attitudes. In a Facebook experiment, we find that using our method to improve an ad copy increases click-through rate by 40%.