The influence of brand anthropomorphism in user's online engagement: an exploratory study in the healthy food context

• Autor(a) principal: Lopes, Tânia Raquel Oliveira
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/15409
• topic: Brand anthropomorphism; Content creation; Internet; Social networks; Marketing de produtos; Estratégias de marca; Antropomorfismo; Rede social; Hábito alimentar; Saúde; Análise de conteúdo

The use of Anthropomorphism as a strategy for creating content is widely disseminated, being present in an online context through different formats; however, there are only a few studies that evaluate the effectiveness of these strategies. The current research tries to address this gap and explores Anthropomorphism in social networks as a strategy to improve users’ engagement, and its possible contribution to the promotion of healthy eating habits, nutritional information and physical activity to fight obesity, through a content analysis of brand publications on their Facebook pages. The study focuses on three dimensions of Anthropomorphism related to the external appearance of brand products. In this sense, there were collected 415 posts, of which 315 had to show one of the anthropomorphic characters presented in one of the dimensions. The remaining 100 posts did not present anthropomorphic characters. The results obtained by comparing the humanized posts with the non-humanized ones allowed concluding that brand Anthropomorphism online had a higher positive impact on the number of likes, suggesting that it can be a strategy to enrich content online, and interact with users in order to arouse positive attitudes towards the brand page. Furthermore, it was concluded that the users’ engagement did not differ by content type used in the anthropomorphized posts. Due to the uniqueness of the research, and the posts collected only have focused on three dimensions of Anthropomorphism; other anthropomorphic strategies should be studied in this context.