When abs do not sell: The impact of male influencers conspicuously displaying a muscular body on female followers

There is a growing need to understand how consumers will interact with artificially intelligent (AI) domestic service robots, which are currently entering consumer homes at increasing rates, yet without a theoretical understanding of the consumer preferences influencing interaction roles such robots may play within the home. Guided by anthropomorphism theory, this study explores how different levels of robot humanness and social interaction opportunities affect consumers' liking for service robots. A review of the extant literature is conducted, yielding three hypotheses that are tested via 953 responses to an online scenario‐based experiment. Findings indicate that while consumers prefer higher levels of humanness and moderate‐to‐high levels of social interaction opportunity, only some participants liked robots more when dialogue (high‐interaction opportunity) was offered. Resulting from this study is the proposed Humanized‐AI Social Interactivity Framework. The framework extends previous studies in marketing and consumer behavior literature by offering an increased understanding of how households will choose to interact with service robots in domestic environments based on humanness and social interaction. Guidelines for practitioners and two overarching themes for future research emerge from this study. This paper contributes to an increased understanding of potential interactions with service robots in domestic environments.

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Robots should be seen and not heard…sometimes: Anthropomorphism and AI service robot interactions

Letheren

Jetten

Roberts

et al. 2021

“…Finally, it should be noted that we have taken self‐congruence into account globally. Therefore, it should be considered that essential identity characteristics such as race (Brumbaugh, 2009) and gender (Su et al, 2020) may affect both the creation of self‐congruence, which is related to people's identity, and its effect on behavioral outcomes.…”

Section: Future Research Directions and Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Benefits of matching consumers’ personality: Creating perceived trustworthiness via actual self‐congruence and perceived competence via ideal self‐congruence

Zogaj

Tscheulin

Olk

2020

Endorsers such as social media influencers who aim to match consumers’ personality to strengthen their credibility must consider that actual self‐congruence and ideal self‐congruence have different effects on the main dimensions of credibility: perceived trustworthiness and perceived competence. In our study, we conceptually argue that actual self‐congruence is associated more strongly with a closer psychological distance and, in turn, with trustworthy information, and we empirically show that perceived trustworthiness solely mediates the effect of actual self‐congruence on consumer behavior. Subsequently, we conceptually argue that ideal self‐congruence is more strongly related to ideal skills and therefore should be more strongly related to perceived competence, and we empirically demonstrate that perceived competence solely mediates the effect of ideal self‐congruence on consumer behavior. Our findings explain the mechanism behind the effects of actual and ideal self‐congruence and demonstrate important differences in authentic and aspirational marketing strategies with regard to creating the perception of trustworthiness and competence via social media influencers.

“…Su et al (2021) examine whether male influencers who conspicuously display their muscular bodies may generate a sex‐specific reduction in trustworthiness perceptions and, in turn, decrease the effectiveness of influencer marketing by means of individuals' purchase intentions of endorsed products. Despite the abundant use of muscular men and physically fit male models in marketing, advertising, and on social media, they document that this practice may backfire for certain consumer segments.…”

Section: Dominance Displays Rivalry and Competitive Consumptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolutionary psychology in marketing: Deep, debated, but fancier with fieldwork

Otterbring

2021

This guest editorial starts with an introduction of evolutionary psychology (EP) in the marketing domain and delineates some of the building blocks of EP, both generally and when applied to consumer research. While EP is a debated discipline among marketing scholars, with some praising its presence and others perceiving it as patriarchal, politically incorrect, and problematic, a central tenet of this metaframework is a focus on deeprooted, ultimate explanations for human behavior. Marketing scholars have traditionally focused on proximate "how" and "what" questions, which are indeed important to address. However, unlike such proximate questions, EP strives to capture the ultimate "why" reasons behind our purchases and product preferences in terms of which adaptive functions they may have in giving us an evolutionary advantage. Having highlighted and exemplified this proximate-ultimate distinction, I then present each state-of-the-art paper included in this special issue. All special issue articles use a variety of EP arguments and theories to elucidate several consumption-relevant phenomena with implications for marketing theory and practice. In closing, I provide a set of suggestions for future EP-based consumer research, meant to make this field flourish further.