abstract
- Customers process persuasive verbal messages through analytical or narrative routes. Extant marketing research offers limited findings regarding the relative effectiveness of different communication antecedents to these routes; neither does it sufficiently specify if and how communication modalities (written vs. audio) and product/service type (hedonic vs. utilitarian) moderate their impact. To address this gap, the current article presents the results of a multimethod investigation. With a meta-analysis, Study 1 establishes the differential effects of antecedents on analytical and narrative processing and the moderating roles of both modality and product/service type. Study 2 gathers the expectations of marketing professionals to provide a comparison with the meta-analytic findings, highlighting areas of misalignment and a relevant managerial question pertaining to the effects of blended analytical¿narrative messages. Study 3 addresses this relevant question with an experimental approach. The combined results offer novel insights into verbal persuasion and suggest several directions for research. © The Author(s) 2025.