Artificial Empathy and Brand Anthropomorphism: An Advertising Experiment

Abstract

This study aims to examine a specific consumer – brand relationship. Seizing the originality of incorporating an empathic speech in brand, the research seeks to investigate how consumers perceive empathetic advertising and its influence on their tendency to anthropomorphize the advertised brand. Through various mood-inducing techniques, our empirical study aims to explore the cause-to-effect relationship between consumers' perception of empathetic advertising as an emotional regulator of their mood, and their inclination to anthropomorphize the brand being advertised. We employed experimental methods to verify the proposed causality hypotheses. Mood induction stimuli were carefully chosen and pre-tested. The selection of the product type and the advertised brand was well-justified as well. Additionally, we meticulously designed and pre-tested different empathetic advertisements, ensuring congruence or incongruence conditions with the consumer's mood. We believe that our research provides a new impetus for the design and development of empathetic advertisements under the umbrella of artificial intelligence contributions in the marketing field.