Emotionality differences between a native and foreign language: Implications for cultural marketing strategies

Understanding the factors that influence the emotional resonances of messages shown to bilingual speakers is an important consideration when marketing in communities where several languages are used. Bilingual speakers have long reported that emotional phrases feel stronger in their native language than in their foreign language. Examples include swear words, insults, ‘I love you’, and also marketing slogans. The feeling of reduced emotionality has been referred to as ‘emotional blunting’. Emotional blunting is most reliably found for lower proficiency languages, foreign languages and languages restricted to work-place use. Emotionality differences have been proposed to be an outcome of human associative memory: the emotional resonances in the discourse context accrue to words and phrases as part of normal use. When asked to make decisions in their foreign language, bilingual speakers have been shown to be less influenced by the emotional aspects of the decision, but the second language may sometimes be more emotional, such as when emotional terms have been experienced more frequently in a specific language. This has implications for the emotional echoes generated by product names. This paper reviews these phenomena and the implications for multicultural marketing.