They're gr-r-reat! Introduction to the special issue

In 1944, several dozen psychology students were shown a short film clip and asked to comment on what was happening. The film featured two triangles and a circle moving across a plain surface. As Rose (2011) reports, only one of the test subjects saw the scene for what it really was. The rest humanised the shapes, variously contending that the circle was ‘worried’, the triangles were ‘two men fighting’ and that the circle was a ‘woman’ being pursued, with criminal intent, by two triangular malefactors. Although psychology students are a much manipulated group – so experimented on, seemingly, that one fears for their collective mental health – this reaction to the test shapes is unsurprising. Humankind is incorrigibly anthropomorphic (Guthrie, 1993). We are prone to see people in all kinds of things. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the recent eBay sale of a KFC chicken nugget which resembled George Washington in noble profile. A bidding war broke out between patriotic nugget collectors and the presidential icon eventually went for a paltry $8,100. Heaven only knows how high they’d go if Brad Pitt’s nuggets were under the hammer. Viewed dispassionately, such auction actions seem deeply absurd. Yet they exemplify humankind’s anthropomorphic inclinations. From the cave paintings of Neolithic man, through the gods and goddesses of Ancient Greece, via the beast fables of Aesop and Apuleius, to the cartoon capers of Mickey and Minnie, humanity has never been reluctant to anthropomorphise (Bleakley, 2000; Jones, 2005). The totem poles of Native Americans, the signs of the Chinese zodiac, the constellations in the heavens, and the elephantine mascots adopted by sports teams and university colleges are testament to the ubiquity of anthropomorphism, as are our everyday interactions with companion animals (Baker, 2001; Gibson, 2009). Of all the domains in which anthropomorphism runs rampant, it is arguably most rampant amongst managers (see Fournier, 1998; Freling & Forbes, 2005; Levy, 1985). The much-maligned language of businesspeople is replete with 800lb gorillas, apes in the corner office, getting ducks in a row, and big hairy audacious goals (Conniff, 2008). Its gurus peddle parables about purple cows, black swans, long tails, hive minds, hidden hands, and what have you (Tucker & Allman, 2004). Its concepts and theories are predicated on personification – product life cycles, marketing myopia, store personality, customer relationships – and beastly brand mascots not only abound on product ranges, but run wild in the aisles of supermarkets, tout their wares during television advertising breaks, and make exhibitions of themselves in virtual reality (Shalit, 2000). They’re gr-r-reat! In such circumstances, it is apt that marketing and consumer researchers are paying ever more attention to anthropomorphism. Drawing upon the abundant background literature in biology, zoology, sociology, anthropology, psychology, literary theory, art history, and media studies (e.g. Cory, 2012; Daston & Mitman, 2005; Diski, 2010), many marketing scholars are energetically exploring consumers’ anthropomorphic propensities and what they mean for scholarship and practice (e.g. Aggarwal & McGill, 2007; Avis, Aitken, & Ferguson, 2012; Delbaere, McQuarrie, & Phillips,