Can YOU make a difference?

Directly addressing the consumer in advertisements has a positive impact on their perception of the product. Dutch, however, makes a distinction between a formal and an informal second person pronoun. If and how this distinction impacts consumers’ appreciation in and beyond advertising has not received much attention. Quantifying consumers’ appreciation in terms of the attitude towards the advertisement and towards the product, purchase intention, and price estimation, we show experimentally that customers’ attitude towards the advertisement receives higher scores when the informal pronoun is used than when its formal counterpart is.