The Life-Changing Magic of…Anthropomorphism?
The ‘Clean Queen’ Marie Kondo and her prowess in personification
Think about your daily routine. When you come home, what is the first thing you do?
For Japanese clean-queen Marie Kondo, the first thing she does is greet her house. “Hello, I’m home!” she says, upon entering her house. “Thank you for giving me shelter” she says, upon exiting her house. The creator of the “KonMari” method practices the same technique on her client’s homes, bestowing each with a greeting and a dialogue.
“Carry on a dialogue with your home while tidying. I know this sounds totally impractical and fantastic, but if you ignore this step, you will find that the job goes less smoothly”
Not only does Kondo engage in conversation with her home and with her clients’ homes, but she chats with the belongings she deems detrimental to the tidying process. “Thank you for serving your purpose” and “Thank you for finding me,” or “Have a good journey. See you again soon!”.
The KonMari method is founded on the principle that, if you possess something that doesn’t “spark joy,” you are to dispose of it. Kondo has been widely featured on television and radio programs in her home country along with being featured in the London Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Time magazine, and more. Her first book, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up was a New York Times Best Seller. She has gone on to write three other books on tidying and now spreads her gospel of tidying through seminars and apps. She “helps clients transform their cluttered homes into spaces of serenity and inspiration.” Just as she personifies her home, she contends that inanimate objects, trinkets, and all kinds of everyday objects are capable of “sparking joy.”
From a marketer’s perspective, this is a truly effective way to relate to consumers. By personifying something that people don’t fully understand — in this case, a dirty home — you are allowing for a social connection between the two entities. Take, for example, the Michelin Man– a spokescreature with a body composition of 100% tire — or Mrs. Butterworth — a spokescreature who has the personality of a matronly woman but the appearance of a woman-with-apron/pancake syrup bottle (I hear she has a really sweet disposition…).
Consumers may not realize the strength of the Michelin tire until they see the Michelin Man’s stature: tall, large, and well-built. They may not understand that the Michelin tire is exceedingly safe, until they watch an ad like the one below:
“A lack of interpersonal relationships motivates people to actively search for sources of connection,” says Bettina Cornwell, Professor of Marketing in the Lundquist College of Business at the University of Oregon. This finding is “rooted in people’s fundamental need to belong and their desire to form and sustain relationships.” The fact of the matter is that sometimes the product just doesn’t sell itself. It takes a pinch of personification and a dash of human emotion to construct a character for the brand, which in turn leads to a more sellable and relatable product.
In the book Hidden Persuasion, Dutch psychologist and author Marc Andrews says that “we tend to add thoughts and emotions to objects in a similar way to how we would experience things ourselves…this in turn makes us empathize with things like beer bottles or cleaning products. The more we like and advertised product and have ‘feelings’ for it, the more likely we are to bond with it, and thus buy the advertised product.”
Giving life to a product can increase sales, as people are more inclined to buy a product with a human-like appearance. So how does this apply to the KonMari method? How does it apply to cleaning your house?
Rather than considering how you relate to products, as we just explored, consider how you relate to your possessions. Some might say there’s a reason why they’re called possessions — we possess strong emotional ties to them: nostalgia, excitement, fondness or even bittersweet sadness.
Marie Kondo recognizes three things:
1) The value of a clean home
2) The importance of your possessions, and
3) The method of cleaning the right way in order to maintain both of the aforementioned
In The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Kondo saturates the pages with information about the mechanics of tidying your house. It is far from the typical amount of elbow grease and some Lysol, or a conglomeration of scented candles and a fresh trash bag. Rather, Kondo suggests strategy for decluttering your house by prioritizing your belongings, creating a rationale for why you want to keep items, and emphasizing a result: positive energy. The Japanese “guru of tidiness” wrote her book based on the “magic” that can be elicited through cleaning, but most do not commend her on her use of figurative language…which is exactly what I intend to do.
Marie “KonMari” Kondo begins with a collection of simple metaphors. She first asks, “Despite constant efforts to declutter your home, do papers still accumulate like snowdrifts and clothes pile up like a tangled mess of noodles?” . She then takes the reader on a journey of cleaning, describing her cleaning experiences with personification:
“I can’t imagine opening a drawer full of single socks to find they’ve organized a sit in to protest their work hours.”
“I truly believe that our possessions are even happier and more vibrant when we let them go than when we first get them”
She subtly makes us aware of how our possessions and home play such an integral part in our lives. She emphasizes that, through cleaning, you can create positive benefits for your home whilst also celebrating the departure of your possessions. Cleaning not only affects us, it affects our home as well.
She adapts many of the ideas related to prosopopoeia (the ascription of human characteristics to a non-person) imgery that brands often employ. By replacing a thing, object, or task that you just can’t quite “get”, with a face or a personality, we can better understand what we previously were not able to understand.
Marie Kondo operates on the idea that, in order to de-clutter or “tidy” up your life, you must first de-clutter your domicile. So by putting a metaphorical face to your home, you can help yourself like her clients have helped themselves in their lives:
- Losing weight
- Mending relationships
- Pursuing personal and professional goals
- Becoming a happier individual
This is truly nothing new. After all, the roots of cleaning have been traced back to Hygeia, the Greek goddess of health, cleanliness, and hygiene. In Greek as well as Roman mythology, Hygeia has put a face to the idea of tidying. Is Marie Kondo our modern-day equivalent?
Kondo’s approach reflects a very salient idea in past and present-day marketing. Through the allocation of human qualities to her possessions, she makes a typically mundane task something that we can relate to. We see the same method in marketing and advertising. How easy is it to relate to paper towels? Cleaning solution? Processed wheat flakes? For most of us, it is not easy at all. However, the products that incorporate anthropomorphism and personification into their messaging often are able to better convey product attributes to the consumer based on our shared understanding of human characteristics.
Sophia Yanik is an Insight Associate with Olson Zaltman.
