Anthropomorphic animal mascots in advertising - how do consumers respond?

LONDON - June 4, 2013 - PRLog -- Cass Business School has recently undertaken research into the use of anthropomorphic animal mascots in marketing strategies to improve brand equity and sales. They have noticed that through the course of the history of human civilization, people have imbued animals with human traits and motivations, and this is no different in modern marketing. Marketers also often use animals that are non-anthropomorphic to represent a brand.

Despite this constant use of animals to represent different characteristics, the research of their use in branding and marketing is relatively sparse. Therefore little has been discovered about how consumers react to these images when confronted with them, leaving those who put these images into practice with little idea of how best to use them.

The study tested responses to visual anthropomorphic portrayals of animals in popular culture based on their most basic physical similarities to humans. The research found that when presented with an anthropomorphic representation of an animal, viewers preferred a higher similarity to humans, but the opposite when the animal possessed non-anthropomorphic traits. View the research method in more detail by reading the research article from Cass Business School (http://www.cassknowledge.com/sites/default/files/article-...).

This business research (http://www.cassknowledge.com/research) revealed that there are important boundaries in the representation of animals in marketing. As when animals are represented anthropomorphically, consumers prefer to see animals looking more like humans, responding less favourably if they do not conform to more human-like characteristics. However, the opposite is true when they are designed to look less anthropomorphic.

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