Tu or vous on a French landing page? How to pick the right register

"Informal or formal?" comes up early in almost every French landing page brief, and the answer is too often settled by gut feeling — because informal address "feels closer" or formal address "feels more serious". Yet this decision touches every headline, every button and every line on the page, and it's easy to get wrong in both directions: informal address (tutoiement) misjudged can undercut a B2B offer in a single sentence, while a rigidly formal address (vouvoiement) can create a distance that even the strongest social proof never quite closes. The good news is that this choice isn't arbitrary: two separate streams of research give concrete anchors for making the call.

What the research on register in marketing actually shows

The question has been tested directly on brand social posts. Catherine Aussilhou and Mathieu Kacha presented in 2023, at the Marketing Digital conference at the Sorbonne, a study of the effects of informal vs. formal address in a brand post on internet users' responses. Their field observation, based on real posts, is that an informally-addressed post gets better engagement metrics than an otherwise identical formally-addressed one. But their lab experiment, run on fictional brands to isolate the effect of the pronoun alone, nuances that finding: it found no significant gap on self-reported engagement, while still confirming a positive effect of informal address on brand attitude — including among participants who hadn't consciously noticed the difference in register. In other words, informal address doesn't systematically drive more clicks, but it warms up how the brand is perceived, almost below the reader's awareness.

A second body of work explains why that effect depends so much on context. Ann Kronrod, Amir Grinstein and Luc Wathieu published in 2012 in the Journal of Consumer Research "Enjoy! Hedonic Consumption and Compliance with Assertive Messages". Their experiments compare assertive, direct language ("Just enjoy it!") to cautious, indirect language ("Would you like to enjoy it?"): assertiveness performs better for hedonic products — pleasure, wellbeing, emotion — but backfires as soon as the offer is perceived as utilitarian or the context calls for restraint. Informal address is, structurally, a more assertive and closer register than formal address: the mechanism these authors identify maps almost directly onto the tu/vous choice on a landing page.

Three criteria to decide, without guessing

1. The register your audience already uses among themselves

The right anchor is never the register the brand would prefer to project, but the one the typical visitor already uses in their day-to-day professional or personal life. A community of coaches, content creators or independents will address each other informally on social media and in daily exchanges by default; a senior SME decision-maker or a B2B buyer receiving a commercial proposal expects the formal register of their own professional exchanges. It's the same principle detailed in our article on the liking principle: resemblance only works when it's real, not projected.

2. Whether the offer is hedonic or utilitarian

Applying Kronrod, Grinstein and Wathieu's logic: an offer with a strong emotional component — coaching, wellness, online training, info-products, ebooks — tolerates, and often rewards, a more assertive, closer register, which usually means informal address. An offer that's primarily utilitarian and involves significant financial commitment — enterprise software, consulting, regulated industries, committee-based purchasing — calls for a more cautious register, where formal address reassures more than it distances. It's no accident that pages built around B2B SaaS demo requests or regulated industries almost always use formal address, while pages for cohort-based coaching just as consistently use informal address.

3. Consistency with the ad that generated the click

A visitor who clicks an informally-addressed ad and lands on a formally-addressed page — or the reverse — feels a break before reading a single word, exactly the kind of dissonance described in our message match guide. The register needs to carry through without a jolt between the ad, email or post that generated the click and the landing page itself: switching pronoun mid-funnel costs trust, even when each page is flawless on its own.

When informal address works well

• One-on-one or group coaching, online training, creator communities — the typical reader already addresses peers informally.
• Offers with a strong emotional or hedonic component (wellbeing, personal development, consumer-facing info-products).
• A young, independent brand, or one identified with a person (the founder) rather than an institution.
• Ad traffic that's already informally-addressed on social platforms (Instagram, TikTok, "creator mode" LinkedIn).

When formal address is the right call

• B2B sales with a buying committee, a long cycle, or significant financial commitment.
• Regulated or sensitive industries: healthcare, legal, finance, insurance.
• A senior audience or executives who don't use informal address in their usual professional exchanges.
• An institutional brand or firm whose credibility rests on professional distance rather than closeness.

The trap of mixing registers on the same page

The most common mistake isn't picking the wrong register — it's not committing to a single one. A headline in one register, a button in another, and an FAQ that slips back into the first create an inconsistency the visitor rarely notices consciously, but which weakens the page's overall perceived credibility — a mechanism close to what we describe for readability: every small friction adds to the others before the visitor gives up. The right move is to settle the register before writing the first line, then proofread the entire page — including form microcopy and error messages — with that single filter in mind.

How to decide when you're still unsure

When the three criteria don't produce an obvious answer — a mixed audience, an offer that sits between hedonic and utilitarian — the best response is still to test rather than guess. A classic A/B test, with two versions identical except for the register, run long enough for a reliable result, gives you an answer specific to your own audience rather than an average drawn from a study run on a different population. That's especially useful given that Aussilhou and Kacha's own study shows a gap between the field and the lab: your brand's specific context can tip the balance either way.

Our take

Informal address isn't inherently more "modern", and formal address isn't inherently more "professional": each serves one kind of offer well and undermines another. The question isn't "which register feels like me", but "which register does my typical reader already use, for this specific offer, on this specific channel". Decide it once, apply it across the entire page — including the details that rarely get reread, like buttons and forms — and keep it consistent with your ads. LanderKit templates are built so that this tone decision happens as part of the page structure itself, rather than being patched onto a generic layout after the fact.