4
Consumer and product face-to-face:
Antecedents and consequences of spontaneous face-schema activation
Linda Miesler
Jan R. Landwehr
Andreas Herrmann
Ann L. McGill*
* Linda Miesler is Doctoral Candidate in Marketing, Center for Customer Insight, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland (e-mail: ). Jan R. Landwehr is Assistant Professor of Marketing, Center for Customer Insight, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland (e-mail: ). Andreas Herrmann is Professor of Marketing, Center for Customer Insight, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland (e-mail: ). Ann L. McGill is Sears Roebuck Professor of General Management, Marketing and Behavioral Science, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago, USA (e-mail: ).
Extended Abstract
The concept of anthropomorphism is gaining in popularity in marketing and product design. Particularly in automotive design, the trend to develop cars whose fronts look like the human face is increasing (e.g., VW Beetle, Mini). But, in striving for product success, whether the mere morphological shape of a product's design is sufficient to activate a human schema is, as yet, an unanswered question. In the context of marketing-mix activities, what specific contribution can anthropomorphic product design make to developing a product’s personality? To answer these questions, evidence on the psychological process which underlies anthropomorphizing is needed. Aggarwal and McGill (2007) recently proposed the schema-congruity theory to explain how anthropomorphism works, but their experimental approach left it open if consumers anthropomorphize products spontaneously when they see a human-like product (i.e., according to an automatic bottom-up process) or whether it has to be triggered externally.
In our project, we were particularly interested in the tendency to anthropomorphize products due to their similarity to a human face. We chose real cars as objects of investigation and compared car fronts with car sides, since we assumed that the design of car fronts should resemble a human face, whereas the design of car sides should obviously not. To gain deeper insights into the cognitive mechanisms, we investigated in study 1 whether the activation of a face-schema in memory is an automatic, feature-driven process leading to anthropomorphizing car fronts but not car sides and, in study 2, we examined the effects of anthropomorphizing on explicit product evaluations.
Study 1: To investigate whether a car might be associated spontaneously with a human face solely due to its design features we settled on a lexical decision task (LDT) which was performed by 165 native German speakers. The participants’ task was to categorize a target stimulus as a word versus a non-word ignoring a preceding picture prime. For all participants, words stemmed from two categories (face-words vs. car-words). With regard to the preceding picture primes, participants were randomly assigned to one of three priming conditions, so that they were primed either with pictures of cars presented in front view, cars presented in side view, or faces. Latency for participants’ lexical decisions was recorded in milliseconds for each trial.
If the mere product design really accounts for the activation of a human schema, different response latencies to face- and car-words between the three priming conditions should occur. We hypothesized that average response patterns in the face condition should be similar to response patterns in the car front condition, but different from response patterns in the car side condition.
As expected, the priming condition (car front, car side, face) interacted significantly with the word target’s category (face vs. car) (F(2,162) = 3.28, p = .040). More precisely, participants who were primed with car fronts responded significantly faster to face-words than to car-words (t(52) = 1.69, p = .050), whereas participants who were primed with car sides responded significantly faster to car-words than to face-words (t(46) = -1.87, p = .030). Further between-group comparisons showed that latency patterns did not differ between the car front and face condition (t(116) = 0.44 , p = .660), but both were significantly different from the car side condition (face vs. side: t(110) = -0.20, p = .044; front vs. side: t(98) = 2.52, p = .013) which was also congruent with our expectations.
Study 2. The same participants who performed the LDT were asked to rate pictures of cars on different scales (the pictures were identical to the pictures which were used in the LDT as primes). One group of participants rated cars shown in front view, the other group rated cars shown in side view. The scales assessed general marketing variables (e.g., liking, willingness to pay) and specific evaluative tendencies which should go together with anthropomorphizing (e.g., attribution of a human personality to the car). Furthermore, we also assessed the participants’ personal disposition to anthropomorphize cars.
We assumed as explicit evaluative consequences of automatic face-schema activation and, therefore, anthropomorphizing that participants should rate car fronts higher than car sides on the anthropomorphism scales and, therefore, car fronts are maybe also evaluated better than car sides with regard to the marketing variables. As ratings on the anthropomorphism-related scales were highly correlated (r = .74, p < .001), we created a composite variable, named the anthropomorphism score. Overall, to our surprise, participants did not rate car fronts significantly higher on the anthropomorphism score than car sides (F(1, 82) = 2.45, p = .122). However, when controlling for a participant’s personal disposition to anthropomorphize, we found the expected main effect of the car view on the anthropomorphism score with fronts being more anthropomorphized than sides (F(5, 71) = 8.54, p = .005). Likewise, participants were willing to pay more for cars seen in front vs. side views (F(1, 71) = 4.55, p = .036) and general positive affect elicited by cars was higher for front than side views (F(1, 71) = 10.65, p = .002), when controlling for personal disposition in both analyses.
General discussion. Our results support the assumption that consumers anthropomorphize products spontaneously solely due to anthropomorphic design features and provide insights into the relative priority of anthropomorphic thoughts. Specifically, findings show that car fronts not only bring to mind the human schema more so than car sides bring forth this schema, they bring to mind the human schema more than the actual product category schema. This remarkable, but maybe also non-intuitive effect could be explained by the growing evidence from neuropsychological studies indicating that face-selective responses have very short latencies what makes the processing of faces special compared to the processing of non-face objects (e.g. Farah et al. 1998; Seeck and Grüsser 1992). Furthermore, spontaneous anthropomorphizing also seems to affect explicit product evaluations positively under certain conditions, for example, depending on personal variables. Our pattern of results suggests that future research is needed to examine the interplay and relative influence of implicit and explicit anthropomorphic thoughts on consumer behavior.
7
References
Aaker, Jennifer (1997), “Dimensions of Brand Personality,” Journal of Marketing Research, 34 (August), 347–57.
Aaker, Jennifer, Susan Fournier, and S. Adam Brasel (2004), “When Good Brands Do Bad,” Journal of Consumer Research, 31 (June), 1–16.
Aggarwal, Pankaj (2004), “The Effects of Brand Relationship Norms on Consumer Attitudes and Behavior,” Journal of Consumer Research, 31 (June), 87–101.
Aggarwal, Pankaj and Ann L. McGill (2007), “Is That Car Smiling at Me: Schema Congruity as a Basis for the Evaluation for Anthropomorphized Products,” Journal of Consumer Research, 34 (December), 468–79.
Anderson, John R. (1983), The Architecture of Cognition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Press.
Bajo, M. Teresa and José J. Canas (1989), “Phonetic and Semantic Activation During Picture and Word Naming,” Acta Psychologica, 72 (2), 105–15.
Bargh, John A. and Tanya L. Chartrand (2000), “The Mind in the Middle: A Practical Guide to Priming and Automaticity Research,” in Handbook of research methods in social and personality psychology, ed. Harry T. Reis and Charles M. Judd, New York: Cambridge, 253–85.
Benfield, Jacob A., William S. Szlemko, and Paul A. Bell (2006), “Driver Personality and Anthropomorphic Attributions of Vehicle Personality Relate to Reported Aggressive Driving Tendencies,” Personality and Individual Differences, 42 (2), 247–58.
Bloch, Peter H. (1995), “Seeking the Ideal Form – Product Design and Consumer Response,” Journal of Marketing, 59 (3), 16–29.
Bush, Donald J. (1990), “Body Icons and Product Semantics,” in Semantic: Visions in Design, ed. Susann Vihma, Helsinki: UIAH, C1-C14.
Callcott, Margaret F. and Barbara J. Phillips (1996), “Observations: Elves Make Good Cookies: Creating Likeable Spokes-Character Advertising,” Journal of Advertising Research, 36 (5), 73–78.
Caporael, Linnda R. (1986), “Anthropomorphism and Mechanomorphism: Two Faces of the Human Machine,” Computers in Human Behavior, 2 (3), 215–34.
Chartrand, Tanya L., Gráinne M. Fitzsimons, and Gavan J. Fitzsimons (2008), “Automatic Effects of Anthropomorphized Objects on Behavior,” Social Cognition, 26 (2), 198–209.
Chaudhuri, Arjun and Morris B. Holbrook (2001), “The Chain of Effects from Brand Trust and Brand Affect to Brand Performance: The Role of Brand Loyalty,” Journal of Marketing, 65 (2), 81–93.
Collins, Allan M. and Elizabeth F. Loftus (1975), “A Spreading-Activation Theory of Semantic Processing,” Psychological Review, 82 (6), 407–28.
DiSalvo, Carl and Francine Gemperle (2003), “From Seduction to Fulfillment: The Use of Anthropomorphic Form in Design,” in Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces, 67–72.
Epley, Nicolas, Adam Waytz, and John T. Cacioppo (2007), “On Seeing Human: A Three-Factor Theory of Anthropomorphism,” Psychological Review, 114 (4), 864–86.
Farah, Martha J., Kevin D. Wilson, Maxwell Drain, and James N. Tanaka (1998), “What Is ‘Special’ about Face Perception?” Psychology Review, 105 (3), 482–98.
Fournier, Susan (1998), “Consumers and Their Brands: Developing Relationship Theory in Consumer Research,” Journal of Consumer Research, 24 (March), 343–73.
Gauthier, Isabel, Pawel Skudlarski, John C. Gore, and Adam W. Anderson (2000), “Expertise for Cars and Birds Recruits Brain Areas Involved in Face Recognition,” Nature Neuroscience, 3 (2), 191–97.
Guthrie, Steward E. (1993), Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion, New York: Oxford.
Ingram, Jack and Louise Annable (2004), “’I See You Baby, Shakin' That Ass’: User perceptions of Unintentional Anthropomorphism and Zoomorphism in Consumer Products,” Proceedings of the 4th Design and Emotion Conference, Ankara, Turkey.
Irvin, Deborah J. and Stephen J. Lupker (1983), “Semantic Priming of Pictures and Words: A Levels of Processing Approach,” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 22 (1), 45–60.
Kiesler, Sara, Aaron Powers, Susan R. Fussell, and Christen Torrey (2008), “Anthropomorphic Interactions with a Robot and a Robot-Like Agent,” Social Cognition, 26 (2), 169–81.
Kroll, Judith F. and Mary C. Potter (1984), “Recognizing Words, Pictures, and Concepts: A Comparison of Lexical, Object, and Reality Decisions,” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 23 (February), 39–66.
Kwan, Virginia S. Y., Samual D. Gosling, and Oliver P. John (2008), “Anthropomorphism as a Special Case of Social Perception: A Cross-Species Social Relations Model Analysis of Humans and Dogs,” Social Cognition, 26 (2), 129–42.
Mandler, George (1982), “The Structure of Value: Accounting for Taste,” in Affect and Cognition: The 17th Annual Carnegie Symposium, ed. Margaret S. Clark and Susan T. Fiske, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 3–36.
McNamara, Timothy P. (1994), “Theories of Priming II: Types of Primes,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20 (3), 507–20.
Meyers-Levy, Joan and Alice M. Tybout (1989), “Schema Congruity as a Basis for Product Evaluation,” Journal of Consumer Research, 16 (June), 39–54.
Mondloch, Catherine, J., Terri L. Lewis, D. Robert Budreau, D. Maurer, James L. Dannemiller, Benjamin R. Stephens, and Kathleen A. Kleiner-Gathercoal (1999), “Face Perception during Early Infancy,” Psychological Science, 10 (September), 419–22.
Seeck, Margitta and O.-J. Grüsser (1992), “Category-related Components in Visual Evoked Potentials: Photographs of Faces, Persons, Flowers, and Tools as Stimuli,” Experimental Brain Research, 92 (2), 338–49.
Theios, John and Paul C. Amrhein (1989), “Theoretical Analysis of the Cognitive Processing of Lexical and Pictorial Stimuli: Reading, Naming, and Visual and Conceptual Comparisons,” Psychological Review, 96 (1), 5–24.
Vanderwart, Mary (1984), “Priming by Pictures in Lexical Decision,” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 23 (1), 67–83.
Welsh, Jonathan (2006), “Why Cars Got Angry,” Wall Street Journal, March 10, W1.
Windhager, Sonja, Dennis E. Slice, Katrin Schaefer, Elisabeth Oberzaucher, Truls Thorstensen, and Karl Grammer (2008), “Face to Face: The Perception of Automotive Designs,” Human Nature, 19 (December), 331–46.