Study On The Impact Of Brand Anthropomorphism On Brand Equity

Under the SoLoMo background, Internet has gradually been mature. Anthropomorphism, which is represented by online personification, has got many researchers’attention as an important way to enhance brand awareness. However, at the present stage, many Chinese local brands are severely lack of both practical experience and ingenious consciousness in anthropomorphic marketing, which leads to an awkward predicament. What’s more, the relevant academic research is in its infancy without a systematic theoretical framework in the aspect of the influence mechanism of brand anthropomorphism. Based on these facts, this study integrates the theories and methods of marketing, management, psychology, and sociology to analyze the concept of brand anthropomorphism, explore its impact on brand equity and find the key factors which play important roles in the mechanism. The goal of this study is to provide a new perspective for academic research on brand anthropomorphism and an useful enlightenment for companies that want to implement the strategy of brand personification.This research can be divided into five parts. The first part identifies the subject from the current forms of brand anthropomorphism as well as the deficiency of related academic research. The second part is the literature review. This section looks back at the past studies on brand anthropomorphism, social presence, self-image congruence and brand equity to find the limitations of current studies and lay the foundation for the next chapters. The third part is the establishment of theoretical framework. The author establishes the theoretical model of the impact of brand anthropomorphism on brand equity according to the theory of social presence theory and self-image congruence theory and puts forward the hypotheses of this article. The fourth part is the empirical research. This section uses scales to measure the main variables in the model and the datas collected by questionnaires to test the hypotheses. It is found that the impression dimension of brand anthropomorphism has a significant positive impact on brand awareness and brand association, while the interactive dimension of brand anthropomorphism has a significant positive impact on all the dimensions of brand equity. Moreover, social presence have some moderating effect between the interactive dimension of brand anthropomorphism and perceived quality or brand loyalty, while self-image congruence have some moderating effect between the interactive dimension of brand anthropomorphism and brand association or perceived quality or brand loyalty. Finally, the fifth part points out the conclusion, management enlightenment and further research trends.The paper is a combination of practice and theory, its innovation mainly includes three aspects:Firstly, the background of this paper is the SoLoMo trend, which is popular nowadays. Based all of this, the paper sets to explore how modern enterprises shape the unique brand image through the brand anthropomorphism strategy. Next is the innovation of the research angle. Current research mostly concerns about the whole concept of brand anthropomorphism and its influence on consumer attitude and behavior, while little research explores the mechanism of brand anthropomorphism on brand equity. This paper divides the social clues of brand anthropomorphism into two dimensions, which are the impression clues and interactive clues, then it demonstrates the different influence caused by the two anthropomorphic clues on brand equity, which is helpful for enterprises to focus on the more important dimension of brand anthropomorphism to ensure the successful implementation of brand strategy. The last is the theoretical innovation. Concerning there is few theories which can provide a systematic explanation about the influence of brand personification, this study finds the relationship among brand anthropomorphism, social presence and self-image congruence, and introduces the concept of social presence theory and self-image congruence theory into the marketing mechanism of brand anthropomorphism, which is contributed to perfect related theories.Of course, there are also limitations in this study:The one is about the scale. At present, the scale of brand personification is very limited. It can be said that there is almost no mature scales. The author integrates the previous scale items which are both reliable and valid into a new scale, but still can not make up all the defects. Another limitation regards the external validity. The sample of this study are all selected in China and the data set is not very large because of the limited personal resources. Compared with the oriental culture which advocates collectivism, the western culture which advocates individualism has a different way to interpret the social relations, so the conclusions of this paper is not necessarily valid in the western cultural.All in all, this paper constructs a theoretical model of anthropomorphism, which is based on the theory of social presence and self-image congruence. The research finds the marketing function of interactive anthropomorphic clues and reveals the roles played by consumers’social perception and self perception in anthropomorphic marketing. It doesn’t only interpret how human-like brands make an affect on brand equity through social presence and self-image congruence, but also provides specific and feasible suggestions for the enterprises which implement the anthropomorphism strategies. There are still lots of unknown things in the complicated mechanism of brand anthropomorphism, so we have reasons to believe that this area will get more attention in the future.