Welcome Back, We've Missed You! Humanized Business Communication in Shop Window Messages during Early 2020-Lockdown

Bibliographic Data

ID5901102
AuthorsKurt Feyaerts (0000-0002-7021-910X, KU Leuven, corresponding author), Geertrui Heyvaert (0000-0002-4596-5741, Artevelde University College Ghent)
Year2021
Volume6
Issue2
Pages104
Publication date2021-06-10
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLanguages (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2226-471X • E-ISSN: 2226-471X
PublisherMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/languages6020104
OpenAlexW3169937693
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited19

This paper focuses on the way in which small and medium-sized businesses in Flanders adapted communication with their customers during the economic lockdown in March-May 2020. It documents, more specifically, how shops tried to maintain, re-establish, or even re-invent communication with their customers during this two-month period. Based on pictures of shop windows in a Flemish city, we analyze the (semi-)commercial messages that appeared in this setting during this period. This analysis adopts an interdisciplinary perspective, in which a cognitive linguistic approach is integrated with analyses and practical advices by marketing agencies. Despite their orientation towards distinct, theoretical and practical goals, both approaches share an analytical interest in mapping participants and their mutual relationship as part of a communicative interaction. In the period of economic lockdown, marketers urged shop owners to 'humanize' their business strategy by downplaying content-related issues in favor of maximal social outreach towards customers. Considering this advice, it was hypothesized that under these circumstances participants in commercial transactions would be construed much more prominently, presenting themselves and each other as unprecedented empathetic business personas. Much of our data comply with this expectation, thus providing empirical evidence of a subjectified communicative ground, in which both buyer and seller personas figure with augmented prominence as parts of the object of conceptualization. Messages include, among other things, expressions of empathy, solidarity, combativity, but also creativity and humor thus incorporating a new type of humanized business communication. With respect to the analysis of marketing strategies, the collected data at the same time instantiate and legitimize marketers' communication advice about humanizing one's business exchange

Business · Conceptualization · Empathy · Persona · Political science · Public relations · Social media · Sociology · Solidarity · Viewpoints · Computer Science · Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification · Digital Communication and Language · Digital Marketing and Social Media · Psychology · Social Psychology · Marketing

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