Role of biological sex and gender roles on perceived brand personality

Abstract

Perceived brand personality of an individual may vary with various factors attached to individuals. This study intends to explore the influence of biological sex and gender roles of consumers on their perception of brand personalities. Data were collected through questionnaire survey. Four hundred and eleven valid responses were received on various brands of cell phones, out of which 281 responses on four brands were analyzed using structural equation modelling in AMOS 20. This study finds no evidence of any association of individuals’ biological sex with their perception of brand personality regarding the brand. On contrary it was found that irrespective of biological sex, individuals having certain gender roles can be associated with their perceived brand personality. The findings may not be helpful to low end products where customization of products or sales strategy may not be feasible. The findings will help in sales and marketing management of products and services. This may be very much helpful for high-end products, where customization of individual need can be accommodated. This study identifies how social constructs such as gender roles play a crucial role in redefining marketing as well as sales strategy, leading to better management of potential consumers.

Keywords

Perceived brand personality biological sex gender role structural equation modelling

1. Introduction

Brand can have personality attributes associated with it, known as brand personality [24]. Brand personality allures consumer towards it, and helps the consumer to choose the specific brand [3, 18, 35, 52]. Though brands intend to exhibit particular brand personality attributes, the same brand may create different perception in consumer’s mind regarding the brand personality. Hence, what consumers imbibe in their mind or think about a brand may not be the true brand personality of the brand, rather their perceived brand personality towards that brand. Accordingly, this perceived brand personality may vary with various individual factors attached to the consumers. This study explores the influence of biological sex and gender roles of consumers on their perception of brand personalities.

Qualities such as strength association, favourability association, and uniqueness association can judge consumer’s insight regarding personality attached with a brand. The metaphor approach of brand helps in illuminating the sensible and insensible sexual meaning, embodied by the brand [11, 24, 37, 46]. This approach helps to unleash consumer’s insight [7, 14, 44]. It suggests that, consumers perceive brands to have carried brand personality traits. Similarly, where classical approach accepts the brand as a lifeless entity, modern approach upholds brand as a living entity [53] with human like traits and life of the brand [43]. Consumer perception mirrors the attached brand personality of particular brand or perceived to be attached to the specific brand [28]. Researchers such as [24, 36] have identified certain brand personality attributes, which are widely referred by both marketers and academicians. Aker has emphasized on brand personality dimensions such as sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness, and Geuens et al. have identified brand personality attributes such as responsibility, activity, aggressiveness, simplicity, and emotionality.

The features, specification and communication such as advertisement, and promotion of a brand reflect its personality. The advertisers tend to integrate a range of attributes through the advertising message to let the consumer perceive personality of the brand in the way; the advertisers want the consumers to perceive. Congruity of brand related communication enhances the favourability, vigour, and distinctiveness of the brand, which leads to a favourable brand perception [17, 27]. However, it is the consumer who perceives the brand personality attributes, and it may be perceived differently by different individuals because of varied internal and external attributes related to the individual. In contemporary situations such attributes related to an individual may influence the individuals to have different perception attitudes and behaviors [20] regarding the brand personality of the same brand. Biological sex and gender roles of individuals can be such factors that may influence the perception of brand personality of the consumers.

Literature indicates that terms such as sex, gender, gender roles, and gender orientation have been used in different research differently lacking uniformity in their meaning [12, 23, 26, 42]. Biological sex and sex are often used interchangeably to designate whether an individual is biologically a male, female or transgender. However gender roles can be socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women and reflects the social and psychological sex of the person [9, 13, 23, 25, 49]. Authentic social functions of both sexes are gender-roles, which is reduced form of gender stereotypes [4], adhered by social cluster, and typically performative in nature. Accordingly, it is the amalgamation of personal outlooks, principles, social conduct and career preferences pertinent with socially assembled gender stereotypes [2, 8]. Men are anticipated to ponder and perform in a masculine way, while women are likely to act femininely. Masculine gender roles may include assertiveness, forcefulness, and willingness to take risks and feminine gender roles may include tenderness, sympathy, and sensitiveness. Androgynous are those individuals with masculine and feminine attributes both at high levels or low levels [13, 47]. Gender roles may differ with region, context and situation. Studies even argue that gender role divisions are neither static [29] nor valid in ever dynamic society [21].

It is observed that association of sex and gender roles are not automatic [18] rather unalike. Each sex has some predominant typecast thinking/attributes, which are socially approved [19]. Categorizing people using prominent visual and physical characteristics is a widespread process [55]. In society, gender stereotype takes birth during the time of birth of the individual and it reinforces during the association/interaction of social customs with human being [56]. Literature indicates some stereotypes are male oriented such as competition, success orientation, dominant, easily decision-taking and risk-taking propensity and some are female oriented such as tenderness, affection, submission, kindness and gentleness [2, 10, 22, 33, 45, 47, 48, 50, 51, 54, 56]. Freud’s psychoanalytic theory suggests that, human being pass through different stages of life to attain gender-typed behaviors and many factors influence the human being to obtain the gender role, such as cognition [1, 31] psychological androgyny [47]. A social learning is, what is preordained to be man and woman by a human being [39], but psychological image presses significance of individual familiarities and the self in the process of gender development.

Gender role theory [6] argues that, male and female individuals show different traits while interacting with others. This behaviour is greatly influenced by or reflected by gender identity and cognitive identity theory. For example, women may incline to be more empathetic, people and relationship oriented, and men are more likely to be more aggressive and dominant [5]. Gender socialization theory suggests that society attaches different values, rules, rights, obligations, and standards for both the genders and expects them to be different on their values, attitudes, and behaviours accordingly [13]. In turn children try to emulate the expected set of attitudes and behaviour. Biological sex and gender roles, traditionally attached to those biological sexes, have many often been understood to be same with a strong correlation among them. However, studies have argued that both masculine and feminine gender roles are independent, complementary, and can coexist irrespective of their biological sexes, implying that women cam have some traditional masculine roles where as men may have a set of traditional feminine roles [13]. This convergence of gender roles has been on rise and can be attributed to factors such as rise in women participation in higher education, professional education, and work force, their penetration into jobs socially assumed to be only for men, and the gradual societal acceptance of such occurrences. This has been immensely supported by globalization, rise in dual-career-income families, and call for equality among biological sexes in both their personal and professional life. As a result, such convergences are increasing where biological sexes can no more conveniently be attached to traditional gender roles, leading to the need for separating the gender roles from the biological sexes.

In order to make marketing strategies, understanding differences in consumer’s behaviour with respect to their biological sex [38] is inevitable, as biological sex of the consumers [41] may have an influence over their perception of the same brand. Contradicting literature are available both in favour of an association of biological sex with individual’s purchasing behaviour [32], and against such significant association [15]. This study aims to re-explore this relationship, and hence the following research question has been set.

RQ1: How do biological sexes of consumers contribute to the perceived brand personality?

2. Masculine roles, feminine roles and perceived brand personality

It is observed that irrespective of biological sex, gender role may play as an important predictor while perceiving different brand personality attributes/dimensions out of the same product and brand. As per self-congruency theory consumers buy the products or services that reverberate their own image or identity otherwise not just for serviceable traits of the merchandise [16] across various brands and product categories [30]. People with masculine attributes such as assertive, dominant, and willing to take risk may like to control other people and resources. The dominant and strong personality people tend to be tough, outdoorsy, and competent. They value to be responsible for their action and thought processes, and accordingly may prefer to be aggressive, bold, daring. Their preference for such dimensions may propel themselves to look for those brand personalities while turning a blind eye on rest of the brand personality dimensions. Similarly, the people who defends their own belief, are boisterous in their attitude, and own responsibility for their own action. Individuals with a tendency to take stand, defends self, and to be independent, may judge the brand in terms of brand personalities such as being successful, reliable, and spirited, and accordingly they may look for these personalities out of the brand while ignoring the other possible brand personalities. On a similar tone, individuals with feminine gender roles such as understanding, sympathetic, sensitive, compassionate, affectionate, gentle, worm, and tender, are more likely to be oriented towards attributes such as being sentimental, honest, charming, and reliable. Such individuals may tend to judge the brands on such dimensions and are more likely to perceive the brand in terms of similar brand personalities, and similar association might be existing with other brand personality dimensions. Accordingly, the following research question has been constructed.

RQ2: How do gender roles of consumers contribute to their perception of brand personalities?

3. Method

Data were collected through questionnaire survey. Teaching staff of Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT) were taken as the sample of the study. The teaching staffs are from different parts of India representing varied demographic background. They belong to wide range of departments such as humanities, engineering, management, biotechnology, law, film media and health sciences. After having a preliminary discussion with respondents, the questionnaire was sent through email to 1254 assistant professors, associate professors, and professors. Out of 1254 questionnaires sent, 411 valid responses were obtained. The sample comprised of 264 men (64.23%) and 147 women (35.77%). Sixty seven teaching staffs were from rural areas, 87 from semi urban areas and 257 were from urban areas.

4. Measurement

4.1 Gender roles

The 30-item shorter version of Bem Sex-Role Inventory [49] was used to gauge gender roles without filler items. Ten of the characteristics were stereo typically feminine and 10 were stereo typically masculine. Items measuring masculine roles included “assertive” and “independent”; and feminine roles included “affectionate” and “sensitive”. Respondents were requested to scale themselves on to what extent the 20 characteristics fits them on a seven-point Likert scale: “always or almost true” (7), “most often true” (6), “often true” (5), “sometimes true” (4), “occasionally true” (3), “rarely true” (2), and “never true” (1). Confirmatory factor analysis was carried out on the responses to the 20 items of masculine and feminine gender roles. Results of factor analysis suggested a two factor model as the 10 items of masculine roles were loaded significantly on a factor (range of standardized factor loading: 0.38 ( $p<$ 0.001) to 0.81) and the 10-items of feminine roles were loaded on another factor (range of standardized factor loading: 0.54 ( $p<$ 0.74) to 0.87 ( $p<$ 0.001)). Poorly performing items that had standardized loading of less than 0.50 were deleted. Three items from masculine roles – (1) forceful, (2) dominant, (3) aggressive, were dropped, whereas all items on feminine roles were retained. The modified factor model with seven items on masculine roles and 10 items on feminine roles had each item with standardized loading greater than 0.50, signifying its convergent validity. The model had acceptable fit indices ( $\chi^{2}/df=$ 5.4, CFI $=$ 0.87, GFI $=$ 0.86, RMSEA $=$ 0.1). Cronbach’s alpha reliability for the masculine roles was 0.86 and for feminine roles was 0.90. Scores on the 7 items of masculine roles and 10 items of feminine roles were averaged to asses masculinity and femininity respectively.

4.2 Perceived brand personality

Brand personalities of different brands were measured in terms of 10 personality dimensions. Five personality dimensions were taken from brand personality scale, and five personality dimensions were taken from brand personality scale. The personality dimensions are: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, ruggedness, responsibility, activity, aggressiveness, simplicity, and emotionality. All the dimensions had 2 to 4 items. The responses ranged from ‘strongly disagree (1)’ to ‘strongly agree (7)’. Due to the low number of items on some of the dimensions, all the dimensions were taken as observed variable for analysis. The internal consistencies ( $\alpha$ ) of the dimensions are: for sincerity $=$ 0.84, excitement $=$ 0.87, competence $=$ 0.91, sophistication $=$ 0.83, ruggedness $=$ 0.60, responsibility $=$ 0.79, activity $=$ 0.89, aggressiveness $=$ 0.61, simplicity $=$ 0.56, emotionality $=$ 0.76.

5. Result

Four hundred and eleven valid responses were obtained for the final analysis. It was observed that respondents have given a wide range of brands of cell phone they use. The range of brands includes Samsung, Lenovo, Motorola, Nokia-Microsoft, Sony, LG, Apple, etc. While the number of respondents who use Samsung stands at maximum (121), it was followed by Lenovo (56), Motorola (54) and Apple (50) and other brands were used by rest of the respondents.

We decided to take the top four brands used by the respondents as the sample brand for our study. Accordingly responses were separated into four categories on the basis of the brand they used. Finally analysis was carried out for all four brands separately to explore the answer for our research question on the basis of congruence of findings for all four brands.

The analysis of the responses for Samsung brand has suggested that males are associated with aggressiveness where as females perceive the same brand being rugged. Similarly, females perceive cell phones of Lenovo brand as responsible, where as no significance association was found between males and their perception of the brand personalities. Males perceived Motorola brand as aggressive and exciting where as females perceive the same brand as sophisticated and rugged. Findings for apple cell phones suggested that males associated themselves with simplicity where as females were associated with activity, emotionality, competence and sophistication. The results indicate that there is not enough congruence between the findings to suggest that biological sex can justifiably be related to their tendency to perceive the same brand differently.

It was found that individuals with masculine gender roles were positively associated with Responsibility, Activity, Sincerity, Excitement, Competence, Sophistication, Aggressiveness, Ruggedness and emotionality, and negatively with Simplicity, Responsibility and Sincerity on different brands. Brand personalities such as excitement, competent, sophistication and activity were found to be associated with masculine gender roles for more than one brand of cell phones. Similarly, individual with feminine gender roles perceived brand personality of the same brand in terms of Responsibility, Activity, Emotionality, Excitement, Competence, Sophistication, Ruggedness, Simplicity and Sincerity positively and Aggressiveness, Ruggedness, Activity negatively. Brand personalities such as responsibility, emotionality and sincerity were found to be associated with feminine gender role for more than one brand of cell phones. The other association can be negated due to lack of their convergence in finding.

Table 1
Gender roles and biological sex predicting perceive brand personality of consumers

	Samsung			Lenovo			Motorola			Apple
	Estimate	Standard	P	Estimate	Standard	P	Estimate	Standard	P	Estimate	Standard	P
		estimate			estimate			estimate			estimate
Responsibility $\leftarrow$ Sex	0.099	0.055	0.519	$-$ 0.610	$-$ 0.249	0.046	$-$ 0.383	$-$ 0.125	0.340	0.140	0.072	0.508
Activity $\leftarrow$ Sex	$-$ 0.181	$-$ 0.107	0.195	$-$ 0.051	$-$ 0.022	0.870	$-$ 0.246	$-$ 0.082	0.533	$-$ 0.634	$-$ 0.401	***
Aggressiveness $\leftarrow$ Masculine	0.164	0.138	0.115	0.045	0.030	0.820	0.687	0.528	***	1.283	0.674	***
Simplicity $\leftarrow$ Feminine	0.236	0.124	0.169	0.134	0.094	0.453	0.420	0.339	0.009	0.400	0.259	0.036
Aggressiveness $\leftarrow$ Sex	0.487	0.238	0.006	0.055	0.022	0.866	$-$ 0.823	$-$ 0.263	0.017	$-$ 0.053	$-$ 0.017	0.866
Simplicity $\leftarrow$ Sex	0.377	0.129	0.152	$-$ 0.217	$-$ 0.102	0.417	$-$ 0.211	$-$ 0.075	0.563	1.173	0.425	***
Emotionality $\leftarrow$ Sex	$-$ 0.199	$-$ 0.081	0.354	0.085	0.036	0.787	$-$ 0.794	$-$ 0.239	0.059	$-$ 1.356	$-$ 0.387	0.002
Sincerity $\leftarrow$ Sex	0.143	0.081	0.349	$-$ 0.316	$-$ 0.135	0.310	$-$ 0.549	$-$ 0.182	0.162	$-$ 0.240	$-$ 0.126	0.298
Excitement $\leftarrow$ Sex	$-$ 0.099	$-$ 0.056	0.495	$-$ 0.274	$-$ 0.109	0.403	$-$ 0.958	$-$ 0.305	0.002	$-$ 0.847	$-$ 0.440	***
Competence $\leftarrow$ Sex	0.038	0.019	0.819	$-$ 0.515	$-$ 0.196	0.122	$-$ 0.591	$-$ 0.175	0.167	$-$ 0.493	$-$ 0.374	0.003
Sophistication $\leftarrow$ Sex	$-$ 0.239	$-$ 0.123	0.149	$-$ 0.146	$-$ 0.068	0.611	$-$ 1.025	$-$ 0.300	0.007	$-$ 0.552	$-$ 0.358	0.007
Ruggedness $\leftarrow$ Sex	$-$ 0.433	$-$ 0.204	0.018	$-$ 0.402	$-$ 0.160	0.224	$-$ 0.989	$-$ 0.278	0.017	$-$ 0.384	$-$ 0.137	0.140
Responsibility $\leftarrow$ Masculine	0.188	0.180	0.036	$-$ 0.021	$-$ 0.014	0.909	0.263	0.206	0.116	$-$ 0.389	$-$ 0.339	0.002
Activity $\leftarrow$ Masculine	0.294	0.299	***	0.098	0.070	0.601	0.336	0.269	0.040	0.099	0.105	0.388
Simplicity $\leftarrow$ Masculine	$-$ 0.045	$-$ 0.026	0.769	$-$ 0.430	$-$ 0.332	0.008	0.020	0.017	0.892	0.140	0.085	0.491
Sincerity $\leftarrow$ Masculine	0.256	0.250	0.004	$-$ 0.108	$-$ 0.076	0.568	0.261	0.208	0.109	$-$ 0.277	$-$ 0.245	0.043
Excitement $\leftarrow$ Masculine	0.375	0.362	***	0.281	0.184	0.158	0.775	0.595	***	0.499	0.435	***
Competence $\leftarrow$ Masculine	0.186	0.159	0.053	0.354	0.222	0.080	0.486	0.346	0.006	0.211	0.268	0.034
Ruggedness $\leftarrow$ Masculine	0.129	0.104	0.230	0.218	0.143	0.277	0.651	0.441	***	1.035	0.620	***
Sophistication $\leftarrow$ Masculine	0.172	0.151	0.075	0.102	0.078	0.559	0.697	0.492	***	0.040	0.043	0.744
Responsibility $\leftarrow$ Feminine	0.328	0.282	0.001	0.474	0.291	0.020	0.231	0.172	0.189	0.585	0.541	***
Activity $\leftarrow$ Feminine	0.300	0.273	***	0.146	0.095	0.479	0.143	0.109	0.405	$-$ 0.279	$-$ 0.315	0.010
Aggressiveness $\leftarrow$ Feminine	0.103	0.077	0.377	0.233	0.143	0.282	$-$ 0.136	$-$ 0.100	0.364	$-$ 0.495	$-$ 0.277	0.005
Emotionality $\leftarrow$ Feminine	0.391	0.246	0.005	$-$ 0.247	$-$ 0.158	0.236	0.437	0.302	0.017	$-$ 0.232	$-$ 0.118	0.350
Sincerity $\leftarrow$ Feminine	0.179	0.157	0.071	$-$ 0.012	$-$ 0.008	0.954	0.224	0.170	0.191	0.478	0.449	***
Excitement $\leftarrow$ Feminine	0.274	0.238	0.004	$-$ 0.270	$-$ 0.161	0.215	$-$ 0.200	$-$ 0.146	0.145	$-$ 0.023	$-$ 0.021	0.852
Competence $\leftarrow$ Feminine	0.537	0.412	***	$-$ 0.300	$-$ 0.171	0.176	0.018	0.012	0.924	$-$ 0.048	$-$ 0.064	0.611
Sophistication $\leftarrow$ Feminine	0.388	0.306	***	$-$ 0.095	$-$ 0.067	0.619	$-$ 0.142	$-$ 0.095	0.393	0.057	0.066	0.618
Ruggedness $\leftarrow$ Feminine	0.308	0.223	0.010	$-$ 0.112	$-$ 0.067	0.609	$-$ 0.156	$-$ 0.101	0.388	$-$ 0.656	$-$ 0.418	***
Emotionality $\leftarrow$ Masculine	0.104	0.073	0.409	$-$ 0.057	$-$ 0.040	0.765	0.036	0.026	0.838	0.504	0.241	0.056

*** $p<=$ 0.001.

6. Discussion and conclusion

This research explored the effect of biological sex and gender roles on perceived brand personality. Results suggest that there is not enough congruence among the findings to suggest that biological sex can be justifiably related to their tendency to perceive the same brand differently. However, brand personalities such as excitement, competence, sophistication and activity were found to be associated with masculine gender roles and brand personalities such as responsibility, emotionality and simplicity were found to be associated with feminine gender roles.

Traditionally biological sex has been associated with stipulated set of gender roles and there has been a perception of set of brand personalities being associated with certain biological sex. Accordingly, brands are projected as being aggressive, rugged, exciting etc. to attract males whereas the same brands are often projected as emotional, simple and sophisticated to attract females. However, this study finds no such evidence where we can substantiate such association of individual’s biological sex with perception of certain brand personality. On contrary, findings of the study suggested that irrespective of biological sex, individuals having certain gender roles can be associated with certain brand personalities. Individuals with masculine gender roles perceived a brand as exciting, competent, sophisticate and active, whereas individuals with feminine gender roles perceived the same brand as responsible, emotional and simple. Though the brand remains same and so as their presentation and communication of brand personality to consumers, the consumers perceived the same brand differently on the basis of their gender roles.

Some extent of conceptual overlapping of brand personalities with masculine gender roles may be attributed for the association of masculine gender roles and attributes such as activity, excitement, competence and sophistication. However, the association of sophistication with masculine gender roles throws light on the changing dimensions of traditional gender roles. Similarly association of feminine gender roles with brand personality such as emotionality can be attributed to their conceptual overlapping. The association of feminine gender roles with responsibility and simplicity may again indicate towards the changing dimensions of gender roles.

7. Implications and limitations

The findings will help in sales and marketing management of products and services to redefine the marketing strategy. Organisations may focus on appropriate communication so as to capture the fantasy of their target consumers. The organizations can redesign their product differentiation to position the brand in market to enhance the conversion rate of potential customers. As the study finds no significance association of biological sex with individual perception of brand personalities, there should not be any biological sex oriented approach in both sales as well as marketing. Secondly, the sales strategy can be customized as per individual gender roles. Though, it is difficult in part of a sales person to gauze the gender roles of a potential customer, sales people can be trained to get a sense of gender roles by communication with potential customers before pitching the product/service features. Sales people need to pitch different brand personalities to the consumers, after getting the sense of the gender roles of the individuals. If a sense of gender role cannot be gauzed, it is better to have a unisex approach than to have biological sex oriented approach in devising the sales strategy.

The findings may not be helpful to low end products where customization of products or sales strategy may not be possible. However this may be very much helpful for high-end products, where customization of individual need can be accommodated. The data were collected through convenient and snowball sampling. Though the sample comprises of individuals from places around the country, caution needs to be followed while generalizing the findings. Data from random sources would have substantiated the findings. We have explored the relevance of only Aaker’s and Geuens et al. brand personality dimensions due to their wider applicability in other contexts. However, exploration of other such brand personality dimensions would have provided more insights. Notwithstanding these limitations this study provides an understanding regarding the association of gender roles and perceived brand personalities of Indian consumers.

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Role of biological sex and gender roles on perceived brand personality

Abstract

Keywords

1. Introduction

2. Masculine roles, feminine roles and perceived brand personality

3. Method

4. Measurement

4.1 Gender roles

4.2 Perceived brand personality

5. Result

Table 1 Gender roles and biological sex predicting perceive brand personality of consumers

7. Implications and limitations

References

Table 1
Gender roles and biological sex predicting perceive brand personality of consumers