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This study aims to explore how brands use brand personification techniques in real-time marketing on social media, particularly Twitter, and examine how these techniques impact consumer engagement, moderated by brand-event congruence levels.

Data included 464 tweets posted by 95 brands around three large events in 2019. The types of brand personification techniques and the level of brand-event congruence applied by the tweets were content-analyzed, and regression analyses were conducted to examine their linkages to consumer engagement metrics.

Results confirmed the use of diverse personification techniques in brands’ real-time marketing tweets as in the previous literature. The study also revealed a new personification technique, tacit expression, not reported in previous literature. The study also showed that the overall effectiveness of multimedia-based (vs caption-based) personification techniques in increasing consumer engagement on social media was greater, but their relative effectiveness varied depending on whether or not the event was functionally congruent with the brand.

The findings offer valuable suggestions to brand managers regarding prioritizing brand personification techniques and aligning brands’ social media marketing with real-time events to maximize the effectiveness of real-time marketing in boosting consumer engagement.

This research offers insights into the dynamic effects of different brand personification techniques in the new context of real-time marketing, extending the scope of literature on brand personification and anthropomorphism. The revelation of a new type of brand personification not captured in the extant literature is also a significant contribution.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made contactless services such as those provided by robots increasingly pervasive. Some stores are gradually adopting service robots to sell products, which has not been explored in previous research. This study aims to explore how appearance personification of service robots affects customer decision-making in the product recommendation context.

Based on authentic in-store product recommendation service interactions, an experiment for three simulated scenarios was conducted and data was collected from 338 valid samples.

The results show appearance personification has a positive impact on customer purchase behavior while it has negative impacts on customer decision time and degree of hesitation.

This study not only enriches the literature on application scenarios of service robots but also supplements the literature on various customer decision-making variables in the field of service robots. It provides important practical guidance for designing robots to optimize their impact on customer decision-making.

The purpose of this paper is an examination of the role of brand personification in the development of the concepts of brand personality and brand relationships.

The paper is a critical evaluation of literature from the 1950s and onwards, examining the evolution and development of brand personality and brand relationship theory and the role of brand personification.

The major finding is that brand personification was developed as a research “gimmick” and that this “gimmick” provided the foundations for the development of the brand personality and brand relationship concepts. Further, the paper traces the evolution of the brand personality concept and identifies the ways in which it has been adapted from its original meaning.

The paper contributes to the branding literature by providing a critical evaluation of the history of marketing concepts and by providing insights into the role that motivation research played in the development of modern brand theory.

Frontline service providers are a key touchpoint in a customer’s overall experience with a brand. Though they are recognized as important contributors to brand experiences, service providers have received relatively little attention in both experienced marketing and branding research. This paper aims to illuminate the importance of understanding factors that contribute to the role services providers play within the environmental context of the customer’s brand journey.

This study uses two experimental studies to show that greater customer happiness and customer loyalty could be achieved through collective brand personification whereby the frontline service provider’s identity and core values align with those of the brand persona and store environment.

Specifically, findings reveal that customer happiness increases because of feelings of belongingness and greater brand authenticity when the service provider aligns with the retailer’s brand persona and store environment.

While this study gets us closer to understanding how managers can leverage human capital in the retail service environment, there are opportunities to further explore issues such as the impact of collective brand personification on the employee.

Given the strong desire companies have to bolster customer happiness to increase brand loyalty, the findings bolster the importance of understanding the influential factors associated with frontline service providers. Their role in creating optimal customer experiences should not be underestimated.

As an important cautionary note, firms should take care when creating the appearance and personality-based occupational qualifications by considering social norms and the impact on societal well-being (e.g. self-consciousness and exclusion can lead to serious illnesses and including depression). Study shows that people have an inherent need to feel accepted and belong to social groups that help to construct and affirm their self-concept, and appreciate opportunities that empower them to seize control against exclusion. Therefore, appearance and personality-based occupational qualifications should be strategically aligned with the image and goals of the firm, and not subject to management bias from an unconscious reaction to an applicant’s physical and interpersonal presentation.

The present study builds on both customer experience and branding literature by examining the relationship between customer happiness and collective brand personification – where the frontline service provider’s identity and core values align with those of the brand. Two experiments test the hypotheses that customer happiness increases because of feelings of belongingness with the brand and the consumer’s perception of the brand’s authenticity when the customer service provider aligns with the brand’s identity and core values.

Given the thriving attention paid to brand personification in marketing, this paper aims to delve into consumers’ psychological traits that may moderate the positive anthropomorphic effects on brand outcomes specific to relationship marketing.

A theoretical model was proposed based on a review of the extant literature. Study 1 conducted an online survey and used confirmatory factor analysis to validate the constructs significantly correlated with anthropomorphic processing. Two follow-up studies (Study 2a and 2b) using experimental designs were performed to provide evidence substantiating the moderated mediation in the process.

Based on the results across the three studies, motivational, rather than cognitive, disposition significantly correlates with perceived anthropomorphism and brand relationship outcomes. Need for belonging serves as a sociality moderator in strengthening the mediating effects of perceived anthropomorphism on brand attachment and brand experience, respectively. Parasocial interaction serves as an effectance moderator in augmenting the mediating effects of perceived anthropomorphism on brand attachment.

This research extends and contrasts the theoretical grounding for anthropomorphism as a set of situational consumer perceptions by integrating its boosting factors in social psychology with emerging brand constructs in marketing and consumer behavior research. More studies are encouraged to probe into the complex anthropomorphic phenomenon.

This research sheds light on marketers’ strategic management efforts in implementing brand personification to target a wide range of market segments with diverse psychological disposition.

Conceiving anthropomorphism as an in-process situational output in information processing, this research provides further understanding of the psychological traits that facilitate the construction of consumer-brand relationships through anthropomorphic perceptions in the context of brand personification.

The purpose of this study is to bring theories of branding and relationship marketing together under the lens of the brand manager and reseller relationship for integrating into a single paradigm. The conceptualization bridges a gap in theory and practice by explaining how a brand can be managed by brand managers building empathetic relationships with resellers and understanding their requirements.

It draws upon qualitative methodology and data collected from 12 business-to-business resellers for brands and 8 brand managers working for international brands in India.

Brand personified and represented in research questions investigated showed the enablement aspects of brand representatives in competitive reseller networks.

The findings of this study will be very useful for brand managers aiming to penetrate markets through individuals who could represent their brands to resellers.

This study will help brand managers to create a stronger brand-reseller relationship marketing strategy by incorporating the emotional aspect of personification to benefit a socially driven relationship.

This study offers new insights into the temporal aspects of branding for business-to-business markets.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the consequences of the increasing prominence of soft skills, focusing specifically on the production of these skills and their recognition and recruitment.

The paper draws on interviews conducted with managers in the service sector in France. Two types of services are covered: large‐scale retailing and hotel and catering services.

The paper shows that the demand for soft skills has caused the service labour process to become highly personified and underline the risks this entails.

The personification of the service labour process encourages the development of specific human resource management practices in the spheres of recruitment, pay and training.

The results underline the need for institutional mediation in the regulation of the labour market. The personification of skills has many social implications in terms of discrimination and policies on training and skill recognition.

The originality of the paper lies, first, in the fact that the results relate to France, whereas most of the literature on soft skills has focused on the UK, the US and other English‐speaking countries. Furthermore, the article emphasises that managers’ practices are shaped by their attitudes towards soft skills, and in particular whether they believe them to be acquired or innate.

The purpose of this paper is to unearth common perceptions of non-profit organization (NPO) trust and reputation, with a specific focus in their overlaps and intersections. Examining the two concepts in tandem allows a more comprehensive approach offering new insights.

This study is devoted to the analysis of the interplay of NPO trust and reputation combining semantic network analysis with a personification approach. The data are collected via semi-structured interviews with 482 individuals.

The present results reveal both common (e.g. charitable, credible) and unique (e.g. illuminating, nice) personality traits. Findings also demonstrate that reputation is a broader concept than trust, with more characteristics. Moreover, it is possible to state that NPOs deemed reputable have a 50% chance of being trusted.

Clearly delineating the relationship between the concepts of NPO trust and reputation has certain conceptual significance and practical value. As traits are grouped in the existing taxonomy categories based on the analysis, it could contribute to improving understanding of these constructs, as well as a modification in the existing classification.

This study aims to assist NPO managers by providing a list of ideal traits for NPO reputation and trust. It can serve as a guide for managers to assess their own perceptions, for comparison with those of competitors.

To the authors' knowledge, this study is the first attempt to provide an interrelated perspective to the study of NPO trust and reputation through semantic network and personification approach.

It is not surprising that the dominant cognitive frame through which most audiences view climate change is that of an environmental problem. However, this messaging strategy has proven susceptible to counter-attacks, defensing processing, and other cognitive biases. As such, many environmental advocates are switching gears. From Barack Obama to Pope Francis, the environment-as-public-health-concern narrative is increasingly found in climate change messages. This strategy involves making the abstract issue of climate change more concrete by tying it to negative health impacts, like asthma, heat-related illness, and the spread of disease. Understanding why and for whom this strategy is persuasive, particularly in a social media context where users often encounter persuasive climate change messages, can help advance theory and practice.

The purpose of this chapter is two-fold: 1.) Test the effects of climate message frame (damage to nature or damage to public health), message source (liberal or conservative organization), and the use of visual human exemplars (present or absent) in social media messages; and, 2.) Assess the predictive utility of different conceptual frameworks (personification, construal level theory, and moral foundations theory) as explanatory mechanisms for persuasive social media climate message effects. The results of a nation-wide experiment reveal that the use of visual exemplars matters when climate change is framed as an environmental problem, but otherwise message frame, source, and visual exemplar use have little impact on policy attitudes. Further analyses demonstrated that multiple conceptual mechanisms related to the aforementioned theories help explain social media effects on climate change attitudes.

Purpose: The present research draws from neomaterialist theories to investigate women’s erotic consumption in Brazil, analyzing several stages of the consumption cycle, from need detection to disposal.

Methodology/Approach: Fieldwork followed the Itinerary Method, with 35 in-depth interviews and participant observation.

Findings: In addition to providing thick description of two consumption cycle stages, the chapter analyzes assemblages of material objects and people that are part of erotic consumption. The dialectical process that transforms consumers through the agency of erotic products also transforms products through repurpose or personification – as lovers, butlers, or party crashers – which, in turn, highlights these objects’ agentic nature. Erotic products are understood as possessing social life and death.

Practical Implications: This research uncovered a series of transformations performed by the object on the consumer (i.e., objectification of the consumer) and vice versa (i.e., personification of the object). These processes help understand tensions inherent to networks and assemblages formed during erotic consumption. They also suggest, along the consumption cycle, unmet consumer needs that may be tended to by industry, like disposal issues.

Social Implications: This study broadly aims at helping women to more freely exercise their sexuality (with the mediation of erotic products if they so desire) in a Latin-American patriarchal society where double moral standards regarding men and women still prevail.

Originality/Value of Chapter: This is one of the first studies conducted within consumer culture theory that focuses specifically on sexuality related consumption.