Selling myself: Anthropomorphic products in electronic commerce

Abstract

What if a product was able to sell itself? Suppose a product could display itself in the form of an animated caricature that walked, talked, and described itself to potential buyers. Such a display may trigger anthropomorphism, the automatic process of attributing human characteristics to a non-human object, but past research suggests that the nature of the product may influence this process. We argue that displaying a product as an animated caricature is more likely to trigger anthropomorphism when the underlying product itself has some human-like features than when the product does not (e.g., appearance, movement, speech, behavior). We tested this form of presentation with a laptop, a camera, and a TV, theorizing that the effects would be stronger for the laptop than either the TV or the camera because the computer has more human-like features. Our results show that participants bid 20% more for a computer when it was presented in the form of an animated caricature compared to when it was presented on a traditional Web page, and as theorized, there were no differences for the TV or camera when presented in this form. Electroencephalogram (EEG) results show that participants engaged in similar cognitive activities for the computer displayed on Web pages and as an animated caricature. However, there was a significant difference in results between the two display formats for the camera and TV, which we interpret as the cognitive conflict that occurs when the animated product display does not fit the underlying nature of the product.