Mechanism Of The Effect Of Brand Anthropomorphism On Consumer’s Brand Attachment

With powerful memory and operation advantages, artificial intelligence (AI) does better and better in reasoning, as if it has the potential to surpass the human. Being aware of the huge potential of AI, enterprises take advantage of this opportunity to reform their brand marketing strategies. For example, China Communication Bank and Microsoft respectively anthropomorphize their brand with "Jiaojiao" and "Xiaobing". Brand anthropomorphism enhances consumers’emotional experience and obtains users’ stickness with humorous answers and humanlike replies. However, even if the artificial intelligence has the strong logical thinking ability, it still cannot replace humans. Humans are characterized as complex perceptual thinking, such as emotion and differences in interpersonal relationship. Therefore, being faced with anthropomorphized brands, which are novelties because of having humanlike characteristics, consumers will differ in attitudes towards these brands owe to differences in treating interpersonal relationship.For the above reasons, this study will explore the effect of brand anthropomorphism on brand attachment and its boundary conditions. We use four experiments to demonstrate that brand anthropomorphism can exert an influence on consumers’brand attachment. Specifically, study one shows that an anthropomorphized brand can affect brand attachment compared to those without brand anthropomorphism. Study two suggests that anxiety attachment style can strengthen the effect of brand anthropomorphism on brand attachment when a consumer has a low avoidant attachment style, but the interaction between brand anthropomorphism and anxiety attachment style is insignificant when a consumer has a high avoidant attachment style. Study 2, with study 3, presents that high avoidant attachment style weakens the effect of brand anthropomorphism on brand attachment. Finally, we discuss theoretical and managerial contributions of this research.