Ingredients are the component parts or elements of something. Brands often portray a product’s ingredients, components, and parts as humanlike messengers in advertising and packaging. Nature’s Way, for example, humanizes a strawberry for their Vita Gummies by portraying it with eyes and a mouth. This study explores whether imbuing ingredients or components with humanlike features influences consumer perceptions and decisions. The results of Study 1 demonstrated that anthropomorphizing an ingredient successfully intensified consumer purchase decision in a coffee shop context. However, not all humanized ingredients were effective. The data from Study 2 revealed that anthropomorphizing a primary ingredient was more likely to increase purchase intentions than anthropomorphizing a secondary ingredient. This effect was mediated by quality perceptions. While prior research investigated the effect of product anthropomorphization on consumer responses, our study mainly focused on humanizing the ingredients that constitute a product, an important topic that has not yet been investigated in the marketing and consumer research.

• Wen-Hsien Huang(National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan (R.O.C.))
• Chun-Ming Yang(Ming Chuan University, Taiwan (R.O.C.))