To swear or not to swear: Exploring the role of profanity in influencer marketing

Abstract Influencers play a central role in promoting products and services on digital platforms. Understanding the impact of their linguistic choices, including the use of profanity, is therefore important for marketers seeking to engage target audiences. This study investigates how influencers’ profanity usage shapes user engagement. The authors analyze videos shared by influencers on a popular video-sharing platform and extract auditory, visual, and verbal features using a range of machine-learning tools. The findings indicate that profanity in focal content is associated with lower engagement, with a substantially larger effect in categories where profanity is less normatively expected. This negative effect is more pronounced when influencers are female, when the post is sponsored, or when the content is otherwise polite. At the same time, an influencer’s profanity history attenuates this effect, though this adaptation is constrained in categories where profanity is less normative. In these settings, consistent usage can even amplify negative reactions. These results indicate that the engagement consequences of profanity in influencer marketing are shaped by category-level norms and the influencer’s established communicative style. The findings offer important implications for marketers, influencers, and platform owners.