Mine Your Language: Influence, Engage, Predict

Statutory warning: Language is a minefield. Words that firms and consumers use can be dealbreakers! Today, firms have many language-based decisions to make--from the brand name to the language of their annual reports to what they should or shouldn’t say on social media. Moreover, consumers leave a goldmine of information via their words expressing their likes, dislikes, perceptions and attitudes. What the firm communicates and what consumers say have an impact on consumer attitudes, satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately, on a firm’s sales, market share and profits. In this book, Abhishek Borah meticulously and marvellously showcases the influence of language on business. Through examples ranging from Toyota to Tesla and Metallica to Mahatma Gandhi, you will read about how to improvise on social media, how changing the use of simple pronouns like ’we’ and ’you’ can affect a firm’s bottom line, how to spot a fake review online and much more.

Abhishek Borah is an Associate Professor at INSEAD, France. In the past, he has been an assistant professor at the Foster School of Business, University of Washington, Seattle and a visiting assistant professor at the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Prior to academia, he worked for McKinsey & Company in India.

Abhishek was raised in Nagaland and studied in Dimapur, Shillong, Delhi, and Los Angeles. He is the winner of the Varadarajan award for early career contributions to Marketing Strategy and a Marketing Science Institute (MSI) young scholar. He has published many articles in top-tier journals and has been cited in publications like Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Nature, Ad Age and Forbes. He lives in Paris, France. This is his first book.