It’s not what you say, it’s the way you say it! Effective message styles for promoting innovative new services

While innovations are critical to firms' long-term survival, they have a high failure rate. Identifying the factors that encourage consumer adoption of innovations is therefore essential for the successful management of new products and services. While prior research suggests that two message styles (i.e., metaphors and narratives) can help convey the benefits of new services, extant scholarly work has not examined which style increases adoption intentions to a greater extent. Study 1 demonstrates that metaphors enhance adoption intentions more than narratives for incrementally new services (INSs) but not for really new services (RNSs). Study 2 shows that low-figurativeness metaphors enhance adoption intentions more than high-figurativeness metaphors for INSs but not for RNSs and that consumers' negative cognitive responses underlie this effect. These findings have important implications for theory and practice.