Influencer marketing is a popular strategy to connect with consumers. However, influencers’ use of overly high-arousal language in promoting products (e.g., “it's totally AMAZING!”) has raised questions about their true motivations. This article investigates how high-arousal language in micro- versus macro-influencers’ sponsored posts might shape engagement. A multimethod approach, combining automated text, image, video, and audio analyses of thousands of Instagram and TikTok posts with controlled experiments, demonstrates that high-arousal language increases engagement with micro-influencers, but it decreases engagement with macro-influencers, seemingly because it makes micro- (macro-) influencers appear more (less) trustworthy. Yet the negative effect of arousal for macro-influencers can be mitigated if their posts provide counterbalanced valence (both positive and negative assessments) or if they indicate an informative, rather than commercial, goal. These findings deepen understanding of how language arousal shapes consumer responses, reveal a psychological mechanism through which language arousal affects perceptions, and provide actionable insights for crafting more effective social media content.

To date, the literature offers multiple suggestions for how to recover from service failures, albeit without explicitly addressing customers’ negative, high-arousal states evoked by the failure. The few studies that do address ways to improve negative emotions after failures focus on face-to-face interactions only. Because many customers today prefer to complain on social media, firms must learn how to effectively de-escalate negative, high-arousal emotions through text-based exchanges to achieve successful service recoveries. With three field studies using natural language processing tools and three preregistered controlled experiments, the current research identifies ways to mitigate negative arousal in text-based social media complaining, specifically, active listening and empathy. In detail, increasing active listening and empathy in the firm response evokes gratitude among customers in high-arousal states, even if the actual failure is not (yet) recovered. These findings provide a new theoretical perspective on the role of customer arousal in service failures and recoveries as well as managerially relevant implications for dealing with public social media complaints.