서강대학교

초록 (요약문)

Mindreading is an essential cognitive process in our social lives for predicting, reasoning, and describing others’ mental states. Consumers are exposed to many brand communication strategies that try to communicate the brand’s mind, which demands cognitive effort from the consumers. The current research investigates what will stimulate consumers’ propensities to undergo mindreading the brand’s mind that they are exposed to. Drawing on prior studies demonstrating that engaging in interpersonal synchronized movement can elicit greater tendencies to attribute the mental state of the synchronized partner, the current study provides evidence that when consumers mentally anthropomorphize a brand and imagine engaging in interpersonal synchronized movement with a brand, this can elicit similar prosocial cognitive consequences to those of interaction between people. Further, the current study shows that when consumers attribute the brand’s mental state, this subsequently increases consumers’ willingness to search for information about the brand. Finally, the study examines the consequences of consumers imagining interpersonal synchronized movement with a brand in a private setting or in a group setting, finding that imagining the interaction in a group setting hampers consumers’ propensities to mindread the cooperated brand’s mind.