Building brand resonance with chatbots: assessing the importance of giving your bot a human personality

Abstract

This paper aims at defining the effect that different types of personality given to chatbots may have on the brand resonance in consumer’s mind. In the current context of quick development of conversational marketing solutions, and particularly chatbots, managers should precisely understand how to build these tools in order to seize consumer’s attention and build positive consumer experience (Ogilvy, 2016). Using the definition of brand resonance and its four dimensions (Keller, 2003) – behavioural loyalty, attitudinal attachment, sense of community and active engagement - we tested which personality chatbots should be built with to enhance resonance in the mind of users. Furthermore, we defined the scope of personality as follows: chatbots’ idiomatic as well as physical features that the bot displays and its name (mentioned later as the face of the chatbot). This thesis explores the main hypothesis that a human-type personality is critical for a chatbot to boost the brand resonance, and is divided in four sub-hypotheses to test. Each sub-hypothesis meant to test the impact of chatbot’s personality on one particular dimension of brand resonance. Our study shows the following main findings: there are significant proofs that building a chatbot with a human idiomatic nature is efficient to strengthen behavioural loyalty, attitudinal attachment as well as active engagement, and thus brand resonance itself. On the other hand, our results could not confirm if the chatbot’s face had any effect on the brand resonance.