Unveiling The Secrets Of Personification In Marketing:

The value of personification in marketing has never been neglected in the past decades. Advertisers were keen to portray their brands in the shape of human beings, to give them names, or even stories. The internet has brought great changes to the market, including that of the personified brands’. The wide use of mobile internet and social network services has introduced brand-new possibilities to the ways in which marketers may personify a brand. For example, the world-known Hatsune Miku, a Japanese cartoon character who is essentially a virtual idol created to promote a PC application called "Vocaloid", has been dominating the popularity charts all around the globe. Unlike any animated brand mascot, Miku is frequently found interacting with customers in a particularly lively fashion. She "talks" through online BBSs, and even "performs" live shows in front of thousands of audiences (thanks to the latest3D technology). She is now a world-beloved fashion idol. Her value goes way beyond business, and claims to enter the cultural territory.The success of Miku leads many companies to try their hands in personification. Many of them claim victorious, while the others suffer negative feedbacks. According to a research conducted by Baidu, a renowned online search engine in China,3out of5least favored advertisements for consumers are related with using animated characters. Therefore, it is high time for marketing researchers go deep into the mechanism of personification and identify the cause for such difference.This been said, the existing research in personified marketing remains scarce. The western world has witnessed several endeavors to the identification of the effectiveness of personification in the past decade (e.g. Puzakova, Kwak&Rocereto,2013; Aggarwal&McGill,2012). Yet none of them is focused on the mechanism or definition of personification. The prior scholars adopted personification as a mere element in stimuli design, yet they provided no explanation as to why or how the "human-related materials"(including image or verbal description) are effective in the ways they predicted.The current research, therefore, is the first paper ever to define "personification" in modern marketing. In order to demonstrate our research findings regarding this ultimate purpose, this paper is constructed using5sequential chapters:To start with, the purpose of the introduction of this paper is two-fold:firstly, the author presents examples of the upsurging phenomenon of personification; secondly, the author identifies the potential shortfalls in prior studies in concern. This part is constructed only to demonstrate the universal demand for more focused and in-depth research in personification, which comes in the chapters that follow.In the second chapter, the researcher presents an outline for the previous researches related to personification in marketing. As was discussed in previous passages, the academic record of personification in marketing is still in its infancy. In other fields, including anthropology, sociology and literature, however, personification has long been the center of metonymy study, which is key in many related fields. The researcher therefore includes literature from various subjects in hope that it would present a more self-explanatory concept of what personification really is. The purpose of this chapter is to identify the gap taking place in the existing literature, which is the foundation for the following researches.The third chapter of this paper is aimed to fulfill the existing gap in personification literature. The purpose is to explore the formation, effect and mechanism of personification in marketing. Due to the insufficiency of literature, in this part, this research adopts grounded theory as the dominating methodology. The results indicate that the mechanism of personification is largely depended on the creation of perceived social presence by consumers. The author also presents findings related to the potential risks which bear by personified brands/products. In the next chapter, the author seeks to better comprehend such findings using quantitative methods.The following chapter of this paper is constructed to further the findings of the previous chapter using quantitative methods. Through4separated experiments, the researcher identifies the fundamental component of personification, which is the provision of sense of freedom in the customer-brand interaction. The core debate in this research, which is the human nature of lack of goal-congruity, has been proved by various scholars in anthropology and sociology as the "essence which makes us men". Evidence of the causality between "irrelevant information", which is the result of human nature, and consumers’perceived sense of freedom when interaction with a "humanly brand" has been demonstrated in this part of the paper. Also, due to this, the border-line of personification appears to be self-explanatory:under different circumstances, freedom can be recognized differently. For consumers who are primed with promotional focus, personification can be beneficial; whilst for those who are primed with preventional focus, personification bears risk.In the final chapter, the researcher presents an overview of this paper including the discussion of the results, potential drawbacks, and future perspectives. Also, this chapter provides marketers and managers feasible guideline for personifying their brands.