Should Anthropomorphized Brands Engage Customers? The Impact of Social Crowding on Brand Preferences

Anthropomorphizing a brand (i.e., imbuing a brand with humanlike features) serves as an important brand positioning strategy for marketing managers. This research identifies a key brand anthropomorphization strategy—positioning a brand as either oriented to interact with consumers or not. Managers generally rely on this brand interaction strategy to enhance consumer brand engagement regardless of the social context. However, given that consumers often experience brands in a social context, this research demonstrates that social crowdedness moderates the positive impact of interaction-oriented anthropomorphized brands on consumer brand preferences. Specifically, the authors show that consumers’ inferences of an anthropomorphized brand's intentionality to interact with them in a socially crowded context trigger greater social withdrawal, thereby resulting in lower preferences for the brand. The authors further demonstrate that the core negative effect of social crowdedness is contingent on the type of crowding (goal-related vs. goal-unrelated). In particular, a goal-related crowding decreases social withdrawal reactions, which, in turn, leads to greater preferences for interaction-oriented anthropomorphized brands relative to brands with other positioning strategies. In contrast, the effect of social crowdedness on consumer preferences for interaction-oriented anthropomorphized brands remains negative in goal-unrelated crowded settings.