Advertising to bilingual consumers: The impact of code-switching on persuasion

Building on a sociolinguistic framework, our research explores the impact of code-switching on the persuasiveness of marketing messages. Code-switching refers to mixing languages within a sentence, a common practice among bilingual consumers. We investigate how responses to different types of code-switched messages can provide insight into bilingual consumers' persuasion processes. A pilot study reveals a code-switching direction effect such that minority-language slogans switching to the majority language result in greater persuasion than majority-language slogans switching to the minority language. The effect is attributed to the salience of the code-switched word in the slogan. Study 1 explores this code-switching direction effect in more detail and shows that when associations toward the minority language are positive, the code-switching direction effect is reversed.