Treating Products As People – Effects of Anthropomorphizing Your Car

August 19th, 2010 § 6

When I was a child, my mother owned an old, canary yellow DAF 66. Plagued by lack of comfort, decent heating and general trustworthiness, this Dutch little car wasn’t the most convenient of vehicles. And, as you can see, it wasn’t all that swanky, either.

I, however, loved this thing more or less like I loved my pet, Skrållan the cat. Completely uninterested in the more comfortable station wagons that my dad drove, my four-year-old heart belonged to the DAF, and I would object loudly to the idea of selling it. I even made a miniature of it using matchboxes, which, thanks to the no-nonsense design of this car, turned out very similar to the real thing.

Cars are among the objects people most often anthropomorphize, according to scientists. With their fronts easily interpreted as human faces, and the fact that they move, sound, smell and respond to your actions, it’s no wonder that they’re given nicknames and get called “unreliable” or “sexy”. In all likelihood, the friendly little face of the DAF was the main reason why I took a liking to it. Just look at its white cousin now as it stands in this promotional photo, a happy and gentle family member – don’t you want to, like the male model here, scratch it a little above its front door?

So, of course, anthropomorphizing cars is a common marketing strategy. Like Max the Beetle.

But does it affect you, treating your car like it’s your friend? Yes, according to Jesse Chandler and Norbert Schwartz, in their article Use does not wear ragged the fabric of friendship: Thinking of objects as alive makes people less willing to replace them (in Journal of Consumer Psychology 20 (2010)). When induced to think about their car in anthropomorphic terms, consumers were less willing to replace it. Also, their decision whether to sell their car depended less on pragmatic considerations, like how well the vehicle actually worked. Instead, they chose to keep or replace depending on whether their car (here, specifically, its colour) was described as “warm” or “cold” – a feature that belongs more in the interpersonal domain.

Why? Well, thinking about their objects in anthropomorphic terms makes people start using knowledge about the social world instead of thinking like they normally do about dead objects. And you don’t discard someone close to you just because they, being old or sick, can’t serve a useful function anymore. You care for them.

This way of thinking is not necessarily good news for either consumers or marketers, say the authors. Hanging on to your hopeless car just because it’s an old friend will mean unnecessary repair costs. And well, brands do want you to change cars on a regular basis. Instead of talking about products as living breathing things, anthropomorphize brands themselves, Chandler and Schwartz suggest.

A smart way to use this phenomenon, however, is used by (the generally smart) Zipcar. When the company named all of its rental cars, they found that it led customers to be more careful with them, putting more effort into cleaning and maintaining them. Not bad.

P.S. I fully support the intention of Dutch art hipsters to bring back the DAF.

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  • This is a blog about communication theory and strategy, digital media, consumption, brands and trends by Ylva Lindberg. Ylva works in media marketing at Sweden's leading magazine publisher, Bonnier Tidskrifter. She's also currently writing her Master's thesis in Communication Studies, specialising in digital media. Feel free to contact her via , or add her to your network on LinkedIn.
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  • Author: Ylva Lindberg
  • Comments: 6 Comments
  • Categories: Brand Strategy, Design Strategy, The Way People Act, Visual Communication