It’s estimated that consumers experience hundreds if not thousands of marketing messages daily. While the exact number can depend, how much someone believes the message can be more important for marketing success than the number of messages they see.
A new study reveals that a simple word choice in marketing messages can significantly impact how confident consumers feel about believing – or not believing – a claim. Researchers found that when words differ in their “reversability,” or how easily people can think of their opposites, it can trigger different mental processes when consumers evaluate marketing language.
Imagine the messaging options for a new sunscreen designed specifically for those who like a strong scented product. The first product description reads, “The scent is prominent,” while the second notes, “The scent is intense.” The word “prominent” is uni-polar, meaning people tend to negate it by adding “not” to the original statement.
“Intense,” though, is a bi-polar word, meaning readers can easily come up with its opposite meaning and negate the statement by replacing it with its antonym. In this example, “The scent is mild,” instead of, “The scent is intense.”
“When people encounter easily reversible words, like ‘intense’, in messages processed as negations (mild), they experience lower confidence in their judgements compared to words that are hard to reverse, like ‘prominent,'” explained Giulia Maimone , a postdoctoral scholar in marketing at the University of Florida Warrington College of Business.
Across two experiments of more than 1,000 participants, the research demonstrated that this effect occurs because negations of bi-polar, or reversible, words engage a more elaborate cognitive process requiring additional mental effort, resulting in lower confidence of the statement’s truthfulness.
Based on their findings, the researchers suggest that marketers take this advice when crafting language: for new products, use affirmative statements with easily reversible words, like ‘The scent is intense’ in the sunscreen example, which most consumers will judge as true with high confidence. Importantly, this language would also minimize the confidence of consumers who will be skeptical about the message, as they will process it via a more complex cognitive process that reduces confidence in those consumers’ disbelief.
“This simple lexical choice could help companies maximize confidence in their desired messaging and minimize confidence among the doubters,” Maimone explained.
Journal of the Association for Consumer Research
Experimental study
People
How Word Reversibility Impacts Judgment Confidence
10-Apr-2026