Using emoji effectively in marketing: An empirical study

Chi Hong Leung and Winslet Ting Yan Chan
Additional contact information
Chi Hong Leung: Department of Management and Marketing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom

Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing, 2017, vol. 5, issue 1, 76-95

Abstract: Emojis are increasingly being used to convey information and express emotions in SMS and other computer-mediated text-based messages (eg via social media channels). Marketers are now using emojis in their promotions to create awareness and attract the attention of their target audiences. As a new component embedded into a natural language like English, ambiguity is inevitable, however. Any receiver of a message containing emojis may misinterpret their meaning, resulting in a barrier to communication — a serious problem in marketing promotion. This paper studies how marketers have used emojis to enrich message content while avoiding the unintended interpretation of their meaning. The study draws on marketing tweets posted by various companies in the period between September 2015 and August 2016 and examines the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic functions of the emojis therein. The content analysis results suggest that emojis could be understood properly in the informative context. When emojis in commercial tweets are used pragmatically to express additional meaning in text-based messages, the possibility of multiple interpretations due to their syntactic and semantic roles may be reduced.

Keywords: emoji; marketing communication; linguistic function; tweets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://hstalks.com/article/2870/download/ (application/pdf)
https://hstalks.com/article/2870/ (text/html)
Requires a paid subscription for full access.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aza:jdsmm0:y:2017:v:5:i:1:p:76-95

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing from Henry Stewart Publications
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Henry Stewart Talks ().