Intimate Transportation: The Persuasive Role of Personal Narratives in Online Reviews

From large brands’ in-house writing teams to freelance writers to customers themselves, writing persuasive content is the key to effective communication. Our research focuses on the investigation of how narrative forms, which can generate a sense of personalness, may drive electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM) effectiveness and delineates the process behind the effect. Personalness is defined as the level of intimacy delivered when narrating an experience, or the capability of eliciting a sense of intimacy with the “other,” through the expression of an experience. Together, four studies show that it is this sense of intimacy, which motivates engagement with the content, and enables the mental representation of the narrative (a.k.a. narrative transportation), consequently increasing the likelihood of accepting the recommendation. The effect does not hold for embarrassing products that make the visualization of the scene and of the elements within the scene nondesirable.