What is and what was
A Q&A with Grant Packard from York University in Toronto about the influence of verb tense in marketing messages
We go through life in a fog, in many ways. We are not always deeply aware of the words we are using or the words we are hearing, and we are certainly not always aware of the subtle impact of those words.
Grant Packard is Associate Professor of Marketing and Director of the Master of Marketing degree program at Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto. He is an expert on the use of language in the market.
In this Q&A, we discuss his recent article in the Journal of Consumer Research, “How Verb Tense Shapes Persuasion” (co-authored with Jonah Berger and Reihane Boghrati.) Specifically, we address:
- Why present tense is usually more persuasive than past tense
- What they say about the message and the messenger
- When each might be more suitable
- The implications for marketers.
(This discussion has been edited for length and clarity)
JF: Please explain, in layman’s terms, how you conducted this research.
GP: Sure, my area of research is natural language, as it occurs in the field in many different forms, and how that may signal something about the speaker in terms of their attitudes and that kind of thing. The last decade or so has seen a proliferation of natural language in the field, particularly online, where it is very easy to find people talking about things.
In this particular case, we used grammar parsing to find past and present tense in English language. And then we relate what we find in the field to some outcome, in this case the helpfulness or persuasiveness of a review, for example.
And then we are interested in why this occurs. So, we ran experiments where we very carefully change language features of interest to isolate why this is happening.
What did you find?
People often describe the past using not only the past tense, but also the present tense. We looked at that in the context of online reviews and in other contexts as well. It’s almost 50/50. I can say that a Harry Potter book has a great plot. Or I can say that Harry Potter book had a great plot. As far as we can tell, people probably don’t think a whole lot about that distinction, which is literally one letter in a very small word, but that might signal a lot.
We found that a review, or basically any kind of description of the world, in past tense is is less persuasive than one the same description in present tense. Saying that Harry Potter book has a great plot was more persuasive than saying that Harry Potter book had a great plot, even though the plot doesn’t evolve over time.
Past tense connotes, very explicitly, an experience. It’s something that happened to me that may be only true for me. It could be that it’s only true for that particular time. Present tense can suggest more than that. If I’m describing something that was in the past, in the present tense, maybe I’m signaling that this is true across time and across people, that it’s essentially a description of reality.
And, for example, in academic research, writers often talk about their research in the past tense. They say we found this rather than we find this, but both are in use. We have another paper that looks at persuasion in academic writing, which is your number of citations. We found the same kind of effect — saying, “We find this” is more effective than “We found this.”
I also study concreteness, which is how vivid or real that an idea seems. If I say “a purple car,” that’s more vivid than saying “a vehicle.” You can imagine it more completely. We found that using present tense was linked to that notion of something being real in mind.
So, in short, you can be more persuasive if you use present tense and concrete terms?
If you say things in the present tense, people will believe that you’re more certain and confident about what you’re saying and that what you’re saying is true.
And we found this effect is strongest when we use verbs that are about objective reality rather than subjective experience. So verbs like “is,” “has,” versus verbs like “like,” or “love,” or “perceive,” which are literally subjective.
So it affects perceptions of not just the message but also the messenger?
Yes. We measured it both ways and they both work together.
This is really twisting the grammar around, but what if we talk in the future tense, like, “You will have a good time at that restaurant”?
That’s something that we expressly chose not to study. That’s a prediction rather than a description of the past. That could be another whole study.
Does it matter whether you make yourself the subject in the sentence? For instance, “I think that restaurant sucks,” versus “That restaurant sucks”?
Generally, you find that you that personal-voice arguments are stronger than objective-voice arguments, which is kind of interesting. It may just be that we’ve come to believe that knowledge comes from people, not from the ether.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that if you use present tense in a sentence that you automatically will seem more credible in your message, does it? Because there could be four other things happening in that sentence that point you in different directions.
Correct. Experimentally, we control for all those other things that could be going on. But, by and large, if if I have an opportunity to talk about something in the past versus the present tense, and they’re perfectly interchangeable, it should be valuable. But other more overt cues can drown out this cue.
So this sort of suggests that when consumers make choices, they’re not so much making choices between things, they’re making choices between descriptions of things.
That is a general premise of most of my my work. The whole meaning system that humans use — of language, of verbal cues — is very manipulable. Very subtle variations in those things can lead us to different behaviors and different beliefs.
Usually, to be fair, they’re small effects. It’s really important that people who do my my kind of research don’t say that using present tense once is going to, you know, change voting for a political candidate from 40% to 60%. It’s not. The effects are small, but they’re small effects that matter in the aggregate.
Did you only test online reviews, or did you test other forms of communication?
We considered automobile ads where we talked in two different ways. “The winner of the Motor Trend Car of the Year” versus “It won Motor Trend Car of the Year.” And then there was another where we described the manufacturing process, like “It’s made this way,” versus “It was made this way.” And we can get similar effects.
A lot of my work looks at customer service conversations and we have found the same effect. We get transcripts from call centers or email interactions and we get similar effects for tense there — the agent seems more confident when they speak about the present than in the past.
If I’m a marketer, or in an advertising agency, what does this mean for my work this afternoon?
Anytime I’m writing a sentence, I’m probably using a verb. And each time I want to ask myself, did I write this in past tense? And if so, why? What do I predict would happen if I change this to present tense?
Making something in the present makes it seem more real. There are some cases where that could be a negative thing, right? Maybe there’s some times when we want to frame things in the past tense and have them seem less certain and less vivid. So I think it’s something that copywriters should should ask themselves each time they write a sentence. I now do it every time I put together a slide. I ask myself, “Okay, I’ve got a past tense verb there. Is that the right thing to do in this context? And could it be more effective, more persuasive, if I change it to present tense?”
When might I want to make things seem less vivid?
Maybe I’m describing a competitor. Maybe I’m describing a service failure, or maybe I’m describing improvement, like I’m trying to connote how things change over time. Or I’m trying to suggest subjectivity, and past tense can help me suggest subjectivity. And there could be times when that that’s valuable to do.
James Forr is Head of Insights at Olson Zaltman
