The Effects of Anthropomorphization on Brand Personality Perceptions: A Motivational Account

Anthropomorphism refers to the tendency that people have to imbue nonhuman agents with humanlike characteristics, motivations, intentions, or emotions (Epley, Waytz, and Cacioppo 2007). Past research suggests that consumers humanize objects such as brands when they have access to human-like knowledge structures while making brand judgments (Aggarwal and McGill 2007; Kim and McGill 2011). In contrast to the cognitive perspective (i.e., the influence of salient knowledge structures) that informs most of the extant consumer literature in this area, the present research draws on recent findings in psychology (Epley et al. 2007) to provide a motivational account of anthropomorphism. This perspective argues that the salience of certain motivations (e.g., a need for sociality and a need for control or effectance over one’s environment) facilitates the process of anthropomorphism. We apply Epley et al.’s framework to a marketing context and, more importantly, advance the original conceptualization by merging it with relevant insights from the brand personality literature (e.g., Aaker 1997; Aaker, Vohs, and Mogilner 2010). Specifically, we argue that while sociality and effectance motives both lead consumers to humanize a brand, they differ in the type of human-like traits that the brand is endowed with. We further posit that these different antecedents of brand humanizing have distinct consequences on the effectiveness of brand positioning strategies.