It's Got the Look: The Effect of Friendly and Aggressive “Facial” Expressions on Product Liking and Sales

Abstract

When designing their products, companies try to employ shapes that are both emotionally appealing and compatible with the brand's image. One way to accomplish these aims is to anthropomorphize a product's appearance. The current research investigates how people decode emotional "facial" expressions from product shapes and how this affects liking of the design, using three studies in the domain of cars and one in the domain of cellular phones. In accordance with theories on the perception of human faces, the first study shows that perception of friendliness is limited to the grille (mouth), while aggressiveness can be communicated with both grille and headlights (eyes). The next study examines the best-liked combination of these two emotional expressions and finds that consumers prefer the combination of an upturned (friendly) grille with slanted (aggressive) headlights. The authors further explain this finding on a process level by showing that this combination triggers a positive affective state of both high pleasure and arousal. The third study validates the results with automobile sales data, and a fourth study extends the findings to another product category.

Interacting Like Humans? Understanding the Effect of Anthropomorphism on Consumers Willingness to Pay in Online Auctions

“…Prior research has investigated emotion and anthropomorphism [2], and found no direct impact on emotions when the anthropomorphic products carried a neutral or mild emotion [2]. However, when the anthropomorphic product exhibits strong positive emotion, it can trigger both high positive valance and high arousal [45].…”

“…We know anthropomorphism has an impact on attitude and behavior [35,68,48,45,15]. Researchers looked into how individuals perceive and react to a computer, and whether they treat computers as real humans.…”

Facial emotion detection technology: concept, marketing applications, business drivers and challenges

“…Marketing Research Association whitepaper [20] discusses the applications of facial recognition technology in the field of marketing research such as measuring consumer emotions and interest, for eye tracking in the areas of retail, consumer goods, websites etc. Jan R. Landwehr et al [21] have expressed how the study of facial expressions can be used for product design by analysing consumer expressions and analysing whether they like the design of a product and if it influences sales of that product. P.M.A.…”

LACASA: un caso de éxito en la gestión de marcas y productos

“…Una de las razones del éxito de estos iconos es que a los individuos les gusta atribuir característi-cas humanas a los objetos, proceso conocido como "antropomorfismo", y que genera una respuesta afectiva hacia los productos con independencia de sus atributos restantes (Delbaere, McQuarrie & Phillips, 2011;Landwehr, McGill & Herrmann, 2011). Por otra parte, las asociaciones que evoca el personaje de marca suelen trasladarse a la imagen que los individuos tienen del producto (Keller, 2008;De Iulio, 2010), impactan en las experiencias afectivas y sensoriales del consumidor (Delgado et al, 2013) e incluso generan sentimientos de comunidad en los miembros de una organización (Cayla, 2013).…”