Enhancing corporate brands through service robots: The impact of anthropomorphic design metaphors on corporate brand perceptions

The increasing introduction of intelligent, interactive robots in the service industry raises concerns about the potential dehumanization of service provision and its influences on corporate brand perceptions. To avoid adverse effects, new service development (NSD) managers seemingly favor service robots that feature anthropomorphic design metaphors, so they appear more human-like. The current research investigates explicitly how customers' perception of a robot's anthropomorphic design metaphors might spill over to affect corporate brand perceptions. Study 1, a picture-based scenario study with 109 participants, reveals the impact of anthropomorphic design metaphors on untested corporate brand outcomes, such as brand trust and brand experience. Then Study 2, a video-based scenario study with 530 participants, addresses whether these effects depend on the service context. In Study 3, a field study of 393 participants, the authors examine how anthropomorphic design metaphors influence other firm-related outcomes (e.g., shopping enjoyment, sales). The combined results confirm that anthropomorphic design metaphors strongly affect brand trust and brand experience, as well as other critical firm-related outcomes; they also reveal notable context effects, such that customers of people-processing (e.g., care services) and mental-stimulus-processing (e.g., shopping assistance) services appear more likely to use anthropomorphic design metaphors as corporate brand cues. Our research encourages NSD managers and scholars to consider the effects of introducing anthropomorphic service robots on corporate brands.