Winnie Ng and Vincent Cho, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong

This paper uses a natural linguistics analytic approach, by studying product prelaunch events’ script, to investigate the determinants of driving the product sales. This research contributes to the theoretical framework of identifying the customer values which impact the product sales. Moreover, we investigate how product sales be driven by the optimism attitude and affective forecasting, which are vocal during product prelease events. Through the pilot study of analysing the essential words, which represent the underlying customer values from the script of Apple Inc. product prelaunch events, we found that product functional and experiential/ hedonic of customer values drive product sales. Induced affective forecasting message negatively moderated the impact of cost/ sacrifices values on product sales. In addition to the theoretical framework contributions, this research provides practical guidelines of how to shape the product prelaunch speech to maximize the sales of the to-be-released products.

Product Preannouncement, Product Sales, Signalling, Communications, Speech Recognition