During her sabbatical year, Dr. Ann Kronrod, Associate Professor of Marketing at the Manning School of Business, University of Massachusetts (USA), is spending time at Corvinus University under a fellowship with the Corvinus Institute for Advanced Studies (CIAS). A linguist by training, Dr. Kronrod is part of a collaborative project exploring how language in marketing and business contexts has evolved over the past 25 years, and what that evolution means for companies and consumers alike. 

“I have a PhD in linguistics,” Dr. Kronrod explains, “and I do research in marketing — with marketers, marketing people, with computer scientists. We quantify basic phenomena in marketing and see how language can influence people, but also how language reflects what people think and do in different markets and psychological processes.” 

Her path to Corvinus University began in 2022, when she presented at a European marketing conference. “After my presentation, one of the young professors at Corvinus University came up to me and introduced himself. We shared research interests,” she said. That professor was Dr. József Hubert, who later encouraged her to apply for a fellowship at CIAS.  

Dr. Kronrod has spent the past month in Budapest at Corvinus University, as part of her visiting program as a Senior Research Fellow with CIAS. During her stay, she gave a presentation about her research and collaborated with several researchers on various topics involving linguistics in marketing and business. 

“Our collaboration with Dr. Hubert turned into a very fruitful [one],” she says. “We are already working on an academic article that might end up in a good journal… and we already started thinking about another one, because it just goes well.” 

The project they’re working on sits at the intersection of linguistics, marketing, and computational text analysis. They are analysing datasets of online text by people, by companies, over time, up to 25 years. Unlike other projects that usually analyse a dataset at a given time, they are looking at linguistic change over time. They examine data coming from financial reports, Amazon product reviews, Reddit comments, congressional speeches, and Super Bowl ads. 

One of the researchers’ goals is to identify linguistic trends over time and interpret what they might mean in business or societal contexts. 

“You can count the number of words in a text, you can quantify emotional language, you can measure certainty or uncertainty. And over time, we can see, for example, that there’s more text, people talk more and more. You might also see whether people are expressing more or less emotion over time.” 

When asked about the potential conclusions of the current CIAS research, Dr. Kronrod suggests: “We’re looking for trends, and we will try to explain them. That’s the most interesting part… For example, we see differences between company-originated strategic texts and individually originated, spontaneous texts.” 

This comparison may shed light on how companies and individuals communicate differently, and how each group is shifting linguistically over time. 

“For companies, our findings, I think, would be very valuable,” the professor says. “It’s like showing a mirror to companies… Here’s how you sound. Here’s what’s happening to your language over time. And these changes — over 25 years — obviously are not that visible to companies right now.” 

Consumers, too, may benefit from greater understanding of how language shapes perceptions and behaviours. In this sense, the project also has implications for general audiences, and Dr. Kronrod and her colleague are considering publishing this project in more general journals dealing with more universal phenomena in human behaviour, such as Nature. 

So how much does language actually influence consumer behaviour? 

“Among the factors that influence consumer decisions, price is probably at the very top,” she concedes. “but language comes in a place where we don’t expect it, because language is everywhere.” She gives an example: “You may not change the price itself, but you may change how you present it. That changes perception. That’s language.” 

Dr. Kronrod isn’t just a participant in the developing field of research of language in marketing, she’s one of its founders. “I like to think that I contribute to introducing linguistics research into marketing. As far as I know, I am the only researcher in marketing with a PhD in linguistics, and this allows me to develop the field further”, she states. 

With new articles underway, collaborations expanding, and AI entering the linguistic field, Dr. Kronrod’s research is far from finished. “There is plenty of future in this research,” she says. “We’re not going to be bored any time soon.”