The Power of Emotional Messages: The Influence of Affective Content in Brand’s Social Media Posts on Consumer Decision Making in High-Involvement Services

Given the nature of services, one of the greatest challenges is to design effective online content to reduce customers’ perceived risk and thereby enhance purchase intention. By combining a meta-analysis of online affective content with an experiment and automated text analysis field study, this research reveals that high-involvement service providers can enhance purchase intention by employing affective content in online communication. This strategy is effective because increased affective content is associated with the perceived effort of the provider, in turn reducing perceived risk and increasing purchase intention. Importantly, this research demonstrates that affective content works better for providers with high-quality reputations. Practically, these results help determine whether and how high-involvement service providers should deploy affective content to communicate online.