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Chatbots as a Tool of Brand Communication

Student: Chernysheva Victoria

Supervisor: Oleg N. Kashirskikh

Faculty: Faculty of Creative Industries

Educational Programme: Integrated Communications (Master)

Year of Graduation: 2018

Interactions between companies and consumers are increasingly shifting from a human-driven towards a technology dominant landscape, and conversational agents in the form of chatbots are widely seen as an important next step in how companys’ brand-commumication is shaped. As chatbots become more complicated and widespread it becomes increasingly important to shed light on what drives consumers attitudes towards these conversational agents in real-life contexts. It is also vital due to the need to prioritize efforts in the development of these agents. The important issue appeared towards the need of a chatbot of the company to have antopomorphic characteristics in its conversational design. This paper aims to contribute to this issue and say: how anthropomorphism in conversational design influence users’ attitude towards the chatbot of a comany. 210 respondents participated in our poll. The results show that there is a direct average association between type of a chatbot (with anthropomorphic design or not) and willingness of clients to use a chatbot, willingness to recommend it and moreover their expectations about ideal chatbots. We found that people want to use atropomorpic chatbots of a company more frequently and also to recommend it to their friends and family more frequently. Moreover anthropomorphic bots are more in line with people's perceptions of the company's ideal chatbot. Thus we confirm the hypothesis that people demonstrate a better attitude to the company's anthropomorphic chatbot than to non-anthropomorphic. This conclusion confirms the idea of those representatives of the industry and science who declared that companies should develop human-like chatbots.

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