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Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate whether semantic judgments about products and persons are processed similarly. Our results suggest they are not: comparisons of neural correlates of product versus human descriptor judgments indicated greater activation in the medial prefrontal cortex regions for persons; for products, activation was greater in the left inferior prefrontal cortex, an area known to be involved in object processing. These findings serve to challenge the view that processing of products and brands is akin to that of humans and set a precedent for the use of fMRI techniques in consumer neu-roscience studies. Consumer researchers and marketing practitioners havelong asserted that products can possess humanlike traits (Aaker 1997; Azoulay and Kapferer 2003; Plummer 1985). A tendency to view or describe products in a manner similar to persons may reflect a general inclination to anthropomor-phize everyday objects (e.g., cars, computers). There are a number of interrelated reasons for terms descriptive of human
Yoon et al. (Thu,) studied this question.