Psychological Distance in German and English Brand Language of Eight International Brands Simone Griesser School of Applied Psychology FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland Olten Switzerland simone.griesser@fhnw.ch Abstract messages in memory (Trope & Liberman, 2010). This, in turn, impacts customer preferences Language offers additional insights to (Goodman & Malkoc, 2012), price perceptions sentiment and content. The same content (Bornemann & Homburg, 2011) and the can be described with psychologically attractiveness of the described brand offering in close or distant language. According to the Construal-Level Theory (Trope & general (Liberman & Trope, 1998; Trope & Liberman, 2010), psychological distance Liberman, 2000; Todorov, et al., 2007). influences decision-making. Seven of the eight examined brands psychologically approach customers with their English 2 Psychological Distance in English and brand language but psychologically German Brand Language distance themselves from customers with their German brand language on Twitter. The Construal-Level Theory of psychological Only one brand shows no psychological distance (CLT) (Trope & Liberman, 2010) offers a distance difference between their English useful theoretical lens to analyse psychological and German brand language on Twitter. distance in language. CLT is based on the common Implications on decision-making and brand notion in social psychology that our minds process positioning are discussed. real world objects, such as brands, differentially depending on how psychologically close or distant 1 Introduction they are in reference to here, now, and ourselves. Language has been analysed for sentiment and Psychological distance has four dimensions: content. Approaching language from a temporal, social, spatial, and hypothetical distance. psychological perspective, language may also be The further away an object is in our minds from the psychologically close or distant. For example, a here, now, and self, the longer it takes to mentally brand message may read “From dusk till dawn we travel to this object and its context. The longer the have you covered”. The message hints at enduring ‘mental travel’ the more abstraction takes place protection and security. With its vagueness the and details specific to the object and its context are message is abstract and psychologically distant. lost. Another way to communicate protection and Psychological distance influences customer security is as follows: “Protects your feet from decision-making and is thus important for sales and rain, mud, and ice”. The second example is much marketing. When a choice is perceived as more specific and concrete and, thus, psychologically distant, such as selecting a psychologically close. Both examples talk about restaurant for a Christmas dinner for example, protection and security, yet in very different ways. customers prefer fewer options (Goodman & Therefore, the same content can be described in a Malkoc, 2012), consider price as a quality indicator psychologically distant or close way. (Bornemann & Homburg, 2011) and focus on the Psychological distance is important because it attractiveness and desirability of the different influences how customers process and store brand options (Liberman & Trope, 1998; Trope & 1 Copyrightc©2020 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Liberman, 2000; Todorov, et al., 2007). For choices developed their own designated brand language, that are psychologically close, such as for example also termed corporate wording, to ensure deciding what to eat for dinner today, customers consistency in their brand communication and thus prefer more options (Goodman & Malkoc, 2012), brand positioning. As consistency is important for effective differentiation from competitors, brands view price as a monetary sacrifice (Bornemann & curate the same brand image and values across Homburg, 2011), and consider the feasibility of the countries. For example, Nivea stands for quality options instead of their desirability (Liberman & yet affordable beauty products in both German- Trope, 1998; Trope & Liberman, 2000; Todorov, et and English-speaking markets. Brand values are al., 2007). communicated with brand language. According to the brand positioning rationale, psychological 2.1 Psychological Distance in Language distance should be the same for German and The psychological distance in language can be English brand language for a given brand. This driven by any of the four interrelated distance prediction is tested with English and German brand language from eight internationally known brands dimensions (Trope & Liberman, 2010). Brand from the Brandwatch report (Brandwatch, 2014). language may read for example “… in store soon…” or “… in store tomorrow…”. The word soon is psychologically more distant on the temporal dimension than the word tomorrow, 3 Data and Methodology because the latter uses a very specific time frame: Twitter is an important channel for brand the next day. Similarly, a “… friend …” is much communication due to its notable role in reaching closer on the social dimension of psychological customers and managing customer relationships. distance than a “… colleague or boss …”. Spatial Therefore, brand language on Twitter is examined. distance may be indicated with “… there …” and The sample selection, data collection, data cleaning proximity with “… here …”. In the same vain, procedure, psychological distance scoring, and hypothetical distance is represented with words analytical approach are described next. such as “…unlikely, impossible, or improbable…” and proximity with “…likely, possible, or probable…”. However, not every brand message 3.1 Data Sample, Collection, and Cleaning includes language with clear psychological The brand tweets were gathered on 13th January distance indicators such as those mentioned above. 2020 with a historical search using TwitteR from the R CRAN repository. Table 1 details the English 2.2 Psychological Distance in English and and German Twitter handles from which 800 German Brand Language Brand English Twitter German Twitter Brysbaert and colleagues have compiled a corpus name handle handle with psychological distance ratings for 40,000 DrOetker @DrOetkerBakes @DrOetkerDE words in English (Brysbaert, et al., 2014). EON @EONhelp @EON_de Similarly, Köper and Schulte im Walde (2016) Lidl @LidlGB @lidl have compiled psychological distance ratings for Lufthansa @lufthansa @Lufthansa_DE 350,000 German words. Psychological distance is Nivea @niveauk @nivea_germany an overarching language feature that can be found Siemens @Siemens @SiemensDE in any language regardless of language type, e.g., Tchibo @TchiboShopUK @Tchibo_presse English or German. However, not every language VW @UKVolkswagen @volkswagen_de has a large enough psychological distance dictionary corpus. Hence, the focus lies on English Table 1: Brands and Twitter Handles Examined and German brand language as large enough corpora exist for these two languages. tweets per Twitter handle were scraped. All brand tweets are stored within the R A brand is a name, term, sign, symbol, design, or combination of each with the purpose of software environment. The text of the brand tweets differentiating one company from another in the was further processed as illustrated in table 2 with market place (Keller, 1993). Differentiation is thus an example from Dr. Oetker from the dataset. In a key and brand communication plays a pivotal role first step, numbers, website links, emoticons, and in this differentiation process. Some brands have special characters were removed from the tweets 2 Raw Check out these Wooden Spoon Caramel Waffles, watch the melting middle when placed on your Data coffee! Shop here:… https://t.co/Asjl0cThGs Step 1 Check out these Wooden Spoon Caramel Waffles watch the melting middle when placed on your coffee Shop here Step 2 Check Wooden Spoon Caramel Waffles watch melting middle placed coffee Shop Step 3 check wooden spoon caramel waffles watch melting middle placed coffee shop Step 4 check wooden spoon caramel waffles watch melting middle placed coffee shop 4,11 4,61 4,96 4,73 4.61 3.83 3,69 4,81 4,31 Table 2: Brands and Twitter Handles Examined text. In step two, all stop words were removed from to which people are unable to experience what is tweets with the packages tm and NLP from the not present. Therefore, we need to abstract CRAN repository in R. In step three, all letters information in order to ‘mentally travel’ to a were made lower case. This step only applies to different context and be able to indirectly English tweet text as German nouns start with a experience the absent context. The longer the capital letter according to German grammar. In mental travel, the more abstraction takes place and step four, the remaining linguistic content was psychological distance increases. Therefore, replaced with psychological distance ratings. As abstract language is psychologically distant and table 2 illustrates, plurals or tenses were not concrete language psychologically close. changed, e.g., “placed” was not changed to The rating scale was anchored with one “place”, or “waffles” to “waffle”. While such (abstract, language-based) and five (concrete, changes would allow more content words to be experience-based). If participants felt that they did found in the dictionary corpus, the meaning of the not know the word well enough, they could original tweet text would also be changed and indicate this by ticking the option ‘N’ instead of ambiguity added as the example of “place” giving a rating. Due to missing values and illustrates. Place may refer to the noun, i.e. a exclusion criteria, each word was rated between 25 location, or the verb, i.e. to position or hire and 30 times. As each word has been rated by at something. Hence, no such changes were made to least 25 different people, the ratings contain less the tweet text. Step four, the psychological distance bias and are more objective. The language scoring, is explained in detail next. concreteness corpus is thus suitable to measure psychological distance in brand language. For tweets in German a corpus with 3.2 Psychological Distance Scoring psychological distance ratings for 350,000 words For tweets in English a corpus was used entailing was used ranging from zero abstract to ten concrete concreteness ratings for 40,000 words (Brysbaert, (Köper & Schulte im Walde, 2016). This corpus et al., 2014) that have been employed in published builds on the 2,654 German concreteness ratings psychological distance studies (Hills & Adelman, from Lahl and colleagues (2009) and 1,000 2015; Bhatia & Walasek, 2016). The concreteness German concreteness ratings from Kanske and ratings had been collected in a crowd-sourcing Kotz (2010). These ratings have been study (Brysbaert, et al., 2014). Given the nature of supplemented with English concreteness ratings the task, detailed instructions and precise from (Brysbaert, et al., 2014) and the MRC definitions about concrete and abstract words were database (Köper & Schulte im Walde, 2016) by given to participants. Concrete “…words refer to translating the English words into German. These things or actions in reality which you can four sources provided an initial dictionary with experience directly through one of the five senses” 3,266 words which were mapped to all range from (Brysbaert, et al., 2014, p. 906). Abstract “…words zero abstract to ten concrete. On the basis of this refer to meanings that cannot be experienced initial corpus, a machine learning algorithm directly but which we know because the meanings computed the concreteness scores for the can be defined by other words” (Brysbaert, et al., remaining words in the German dictionary corpus. 2014, p. 906). These definitions relate well to the ‘mental travel’ notion (Trope & Liberman, 2010) according 3 3.3 Analytical Approach full scale range of the original scale. The In a final step, the mean and median psychological normalised data were further analysed for distance scores per tweet were computed in order statistical significance. to have two complementary measures of dispersion because natural language data is not always normally distributed. The rating scale for the 4 Results English corpus ranges from one abstract to five A repeated measure ANOVA shows that, on concrete, but the rating scale for the German average, the psychological distance ratings for corpus ranges from zero abstract to ten concrete. English brand tweets are significantly different The ratings for the English tweets were from the average psychological distance ratings for normalised to range from zero to ten. Prior to German brand tweets (F (1,7) = 14.06, p = .007). running the normalisation function, the minimum On a scale from zero (psychologically distant) to and maximum values of the original scale were ten (psychologically close) English brand language temporarily added to the Twitter data to reflect the is psychologically closer (M = 5.00) than German Figure 1: Mean Psychological Distance in English and German Brand Languages with Standard Errors of the Mean Brand name T-value Mean Mean Difference Confidence intervals for English German between means differences between means DrOetker 18,04*** 5.57 4.56 1.01 0.86 ≤ 95CI ≥ 1.07 EON 14,82*** 4.77 4.11 0.66 0.57 ≤ 95CI ≥ 0.75 Lidl 5,66*** 4.67 4.38 0.29 0.17 ≤ 95CI ≥ 0.36 Lufthansa 5,20*** 4.81 4.57 0.24 0.14 ≤ 95CI ≥ 0.31 Nivea 11,37*** 4.72 4.22 0.5 0.42 ≤ 95CI ≥ 0.59 Siemens 15,04*** 4.92 4.27 0.65 0.58 ≤ 95CI ≥ -0.75 Tchibo 30,96*** 5.85 4.47 1.38 1.3 ≤ 95CI ≥ 1.47 VW 0,97 4.68 4.65 0.03 -0.04 ≤ 95CI ≥ 0.11 *** p < .001, ** p < .010, * p < .050 Table 3: Statistical Comparison of Mean Psychological Distance in English and German Brand Languages 4 brand language (M = 4.41). The same holds true for likely to accentuate this effect as customers can the psychological distance median ratings (F (1,7) easily view Twitter handles in different languages = 5.43, p = .053, Me = 4.58, Mg = 4.38). In order from the same brand. The investigated brands use to examine whether the individual brands the same brand name, logo, symbols, and colour communicate differently in English and German, for their Twitter handle. Therefore, they want to be the psychological distance in English and German perceived as one brand or entity regardless of the brand language has been compared for each brand communication language. Otherwise they would separately. Figure 1 shows that, with the exception have created a separate brand to sell their products of VW, English brand language is psychologically or services within a brand portfolio. L’Oréal or closer than German brand language. Especially Procter & Gamble, for example, have a large brand Tchibo and Dr. Oetker use psychologically much portfolio with different separate brands, some of closer brand language in their English tweets than them selling similar products. in their German tweets. For a brand conglomerate, such as L’Oréal for These differences have been tested for example, it would make sense to use statistical significance by comparing the mean psychologically close brand language for their psychological distance ratings per English brand affordable brands, e.g., Garnier, Maybelline, to tweet with the mean psychological distance ratings position the brand as accessible and affordable. For per German brand tweet for each brand with paired their premium or luxury brands, e.g., Lancôme, t-tests. The rationale for using paired t-tests is that Yves Saint Laurent, psychologically distant brand a brand is viewed as an entity that once language would be more suitable to convey the communicates in English and once in German. The brand’s exclusiveness, attractiveness, and examined entities or brands, however, remain the desirability (Trope & Liberman, 2010). same and are thus not independent of each other. According to the results in table 3, all differences between the psychological distance in English and German brand language are highly significant with 6 Conclusion and Further Research the exception of the brand VW. Language offers additional insights to sentiment and content. Using the example of eight international brands, this research shows that brand 5 Discussion language differs in terms of psychological distance. Psychological distance is important Examining how eight international brands because it guides whether customers focus on communicate on Twitter reveals that the majority feasibility or desirability considerations when do not consistently use psychological distance in reading the brand message (Liberman & Trope, their Twitter brand language. Only VW uses 1998; Trope & Liberman, 2000; Todorov, et al., psychological distance consistently in their brand 2007), how many product or service options they language and thus positions the brand effectively like to choose from (Goodman & Malkoc, 2012) on Twitter. VW’s brand language shows no and how they perceive price indications psychological distance difference between their (Bornemann & Homburg, 2011). English and German brand language. However, the Given the pioneering nature of this research, there remaining seven brands, e.g., Dr. Oetker, EON, are a number of limitations and areas that warrant Lidl, Lufthansa, Nivea, Siemens, and Tchibo further investigation. The two dictionary corpora psychologically approach customers with their employed in this research differ in terms of English brand language but psychologically compilation method and size. The German corpus distance themselves from customers with their builds on the English one but uses machine German brand language. Therefore, these brands learning to generate more psychological distance appear accessible and affordable in English but ratings. Machine learning could help to augment inaccessible and attractive, yet unaffordable, in the English corpus or create a psychological German on Twitter. distance dictionary corpus for another language. By using different types of brand language, Another limitation concerns the choice of brands. these brands weaken and potentially harm their The selected brands are internationally known but brand positioning. Today’s connected world is originate in Germany. Further research should 5 compare these brands with brands that originate in Lahl, O., Göritz, A., Pietrowsky, R. & Anglo-Saxon countries to examine a possible Rosenberg, J., 2009. Using the world-wide web country of origin effect. Another fruitful area to to obtain large-scale word norms: 190,212 explore is differences in psychological distance ratings on a set of 2654 german nouns. Behavior between the English and German language, and Research Methods, 41(1), pp. 13-9. other languages, if more dictionary corpora become available, to examine the presence of Liberman, N. & Trope, Y., 1998. 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