Consumers tend to anthropomorphize brands and treat products under the anthropomorphized brands as if they were human beings. Previous research has pointed out that there could be two kinds of anthropomorphized brands, i.e., servant and partner brands and claimed that typical consumers (non-materialists) prefer brands-as-partner, whereas materialists prefer brands-as-servant. However, there is room for improvement: (1) Previous studies have examined only brands-as-servant and brands-as-partner and brands-as-master have been ignored; and (2) they have regarded materialists as a unidimensional construct, though it can be divided into instrumental and terminal materialists. Thus, we conducted multiple comparison tests among the three kinds of anthropomorphized brands with a dataset of three kinds of consumers. The results showed that non-materialists, instrumental materialists, and terminal materialists prefer, brands-as-partner, brands-as-servant, and brands-as-master, respectively.

• Akinori Ono(Keio University, Japan)
• Masaki Aiba(Keio University, Japan)
• Koshi Takeda(Keio University, Japan)
• Hanako Hokari(Keio University, Japan)
• Tetsuya Ichikawa(Keio University, Japan)