Anthropomorphism in branding a bibliometric parameters and analysis

Abstract

In recent years, the concept of anthropomorphism—attributing human qualities to nonhuman agents — has attracted much attention from academicians and practitioners. Despite the growing number of studies, research on anthropomorphism in the branding context is relatively fragmented, with little effort to evaluate current trends or consolidate existing knowledge. Filling this gap, this paper aims to visualize the holistic overview of brand anthropomorphism by adopting co-word and co-citation analysis on a sample of 368 research articles retrieved from the Web of Science between 1994 and 2023. The analytic findings of the co-citation analysis reveal three prominent clusters: (1) the mixed effects of brand anthropomorphism on customer responses, (2) the multi-dimensions of consumer-brand relationships, and (3) the conceptual frameworks explaining the implicit mechanism of brand anthropomorphism. These findings constitute existing knowledge-building in the given research area.