Non-face emojis in digital marketing: Effects, contingencies, and strategic recommendations.

Unlabelled: Non-face (NF) emojis are increasingly used to complement or substitute words in digital marketing messages, yet the effects, mechanisms, and contingencies of this communication strategy remain underexplored. In a large-scale longitudinal study of Airbnb listings, we show that NF emojis (vs. simple text) lead to an increase in eWOM volume, an effect we replicate experimentally.

Running field experiments using Facebook split test.

Business researchers use experimental methods extensively due to their high internal validity. However, controlled laboratory and crowdsourcing settings often introduce issues of artificiality, data contamination, and low managerial relevance of the dependent variables. Field experiments can overcome these issues but are traditionally time- and resource-consuming.