The role of explanations and metadiscourse in management responses to anger-reviews versus anxiety-reviews: The mediation of sense-making

•Management responses (MRs) demonstrate heterogeneous content features.•Explanations and metadiscourse are identified as two effective linguistic tools for effective MRs.•Explanation-MRs exceed metadiscourse-MRs for anxiety-reviews.•Metadiscourse-MRs outperform explanation-MRs for anger-reviews.•The sense-making process mediates the relative effectiveness of MRs with different features. Management response (MR) has become a popular intervention for hotels to manage customer reviews on social media platforms. This article introduces two important linguistic features of MR content—metadiscourse and explanation—and investigates their effectiveness in addressing negative reviews. It also examines how hotels customize MRs using different linguistic features according to different emotions in reviews. Based on a field investigation of large-scale TripAdvisor data and an experimental study, we demonstrate that explanations outperform metadiscourse for anxiety-reviews, whereas metadiscourse is more effective than explanations for anger-reviews. Moreover, their relative effectiveness is mediated by consumers’ sense-making process. Using explanations for anxiety-reviews and metadiscourse for anger-reviews facilitates sense-making, whereas using explanations for anger-reviews and metadiscourse for anxiety-reviews impedes it. This research enriches current understanding of MR effects and provides the hospitality industry with important guidelines for formulating effective MRs and social media marketing practices.