Avon's apparent success in using entrepreneurship to help women escape poverty, as well as its staying power in circumstances where similar efforts have failed, has captured the attention of the ...international development community. This study, the first independent empirical investigation, reports that in South Africa, Avon helps some impoverished women earn a better income and inspires empowerment among them. The authors introduce a new theory, pragmatist feminism, to integrate past work on women's entrepreneurship and argue that feminist scholars should reexamine the histories of the market democracies for replicable innovations that may have empowered women.
Anthropomorphization has been studied extensively in the marketing literature, and is generally interpreted as "projecting the human onto the nonhuman" (Boyer 1996, 89). To date, consumer behavior ...studies largely examine anthropomorphization as a manipulated variable in experiments, rather than as attributions consumers make in the context of their lives. Our research is the first to investigate how consumers subjectively anthropomorphize marketplace entities as a result of their identities and lived experiences with advertising and brands (Mick and Buhl 1992). We employ the threefactor theory of anthropomorphism from social psychology (Epley, Waytz, and Cacioppo 2007) as a theoretical lens to help explain the ways consumer anthropomorphism emerges through the context of consumers' narratives about advertising trade-characters. Trade-characters like Tony the Tiger and the Pillsbury Doughboy have endorsed brands for decades. Our research recognizes these entities as cultural symbols whose meanings are shaped by unique consumer perceptions (McCracken 1986) that may incite anthropomorphism. Previous studies present these icons as examples of practitioners' "most explicit attempts to incite anthropomorphism" (Delbaere, McQuarrie, and Phillips 2011, 122). Additionally, brand relationship theory limits trade-characters to an "anthropomorphization of the brand object itself." This assumes consumers always bestow what we term agentic anthropomorphism to trade-characters- which automatically transfers to enliven brands as reciprocating partners (Fournier 1998, 345). These assumptions have not been empirically tested to date, leaving a gap in our theoretical understanding of the ways consumer anthropomorphism occurs, and how it fits in the range of meanings individuals may ascribe to marketing symbols. The research question that guides our study asks: in what ways do consumers anthropomorphize trade-characters as a result of their identities and lived experiences? Literature across diverse disciplines explores two central types of anthropomorphization, which we term passive and agentic anthropomorphization. Passive anthropomorphization focuses on "the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman things or events" (Guthrie 1993, 3) and largely involves descriptions of observable traits and behaviors. Alternatively, agentic nthropomorphization involves attributing "a humanlike mind to non-humans" (Waytz, Cacioppo, and Epley 2010, 220). This entails bestowing nonhuman entities with higher-order motivations, feelings, and rationality (Epley and Waytz 2010). Thus far, the marketing literature focuses on the consequences of anthropomorphization of products (Aggarwal and McGill 2007; Chandler and Schwarz 2010; Landwehr, McGill, and Herrmann 2011) and brands (Aggarwal and McGill 2012; Puzakova, Hyokjin, and Rocereto 2013). Extant experimental research in consumer behavior (Kim and McGill 2011; May and Monga 2014) typically examines how one key personality attribute (e.g. a consumer's need for control) influences anthropomorphization, but does not explore the broad array of life experiences and identity projects that shape consumers' perceptions and the subsequent ways in which they anthropomorphize marketing symbols. The first author conducted depth interviews with 57 informants, which generated 54 hours of audio-taped dialogue and 391 singlespaced pages of transcribed text. Each semi-structured interview began with a phenomenological approach (Thompson, Locander, and Pollio 1989) and transitioned into a more structured discussion of individual trade-characters. This allowed us to explore both consumers' broad descriptions of marketing, brands, and advertising within the context of their lives, and also the detailed meanings they shared about trade-characters. To our knowledge, our research is the first to apply and extend Epley et al's (2007) three-factor theory of anthropomorphism to understand the ways consumers anthropomorphize marketplace entities. Our data uncovers that these three factors influence both agentic and passive anthropomorphization-social psychology thus far has only investigated the agentic form. Additionally, each of Epley and colleagues' (2007) three factors corresponds to a differentiated trope (Spiggle 1994) that emerged from our empirical analysis: relatable self-identification, managing offense, and fostering social connections. These tropes encompass the diverse ways consumers agentically and passively anthropomorphize trade-characters. Additionally, our research finds that when consumers anthropomorphize, they do not passively accept the meanings and/or traits that marketers attempt to convey in trade-characters, as previous studies assume (Connell, Brucks, and Nielsen 2014; Garretson and Niedrich 2004). Rather, consumers' perceptions of trade-characters emanate from the intersection of their personal contexts, experiences, and identities (Belk 1988). In fact, we find that when informants anthropomorphize trade-characters to manage offense, it often results in what we term negative anthropomorphism. This construct involves consumers passing derogatory judgments and possibly even rejecting anthropomorphized trade-characters that violate their expectations or standards. Thus, characters like the Burger King that are purposefully created with offensive or strange characteristics may prove counterproductive to practitioners' equity building goals. In conclusion, our research advances an understanding of advertising trade-characters as symbols that are interpreted by consumers, whose meanings may incite anthropomorphization. This conceptualization moves beyond the prevailing assumptions that trade-character meanings are under the control of practitioners, merely to be absorbed by consumers. Furthermore, our findings advance anthropomorphism in the consumer behavior literature as subjective attributions grounded in consumers' personal contexts and perceptions of advertising and brands.
