Disproportional Evaluations of Female Brands: An Abstract

Abstract

Clearly, gender is an important concept in branding. While personality traits can be used to represent brands (Aaker, 1997), brand gender has been shown to influence brand judgments and brand-extension evaluations (Grohmann, 2009). Negative information is more important than positive information in judging an object—a phenomenon known as the negativity bias. In this work, we investigate how negative information affects gendered brands.

We conducted three studies to examine our research questions. In Studies 1 and 2, we ran experiments using real pasta sauce brands and fictitious gendered toothpaste brands, respectively. In Study 3, we analyzed a secondary dataset from Yelp.com. The experiments utilized a 2 (brand gender: female and male) × 2 (information valence: negative and positive) × 2 (time: pre-information and post-information) mixed design was used. Brand gender and information valence were between-subjects, and pre/post was a repeated measure. We explored the asymmetric effects of negative information on attitude toward female-named brands, as well as the mediating effect of brand trust change on attitude change for female-named brands. In Study 3, we obtained a dataset that was made available via the Yelp Dataset Challenge, which included 4.1 million reviews of 174,000 businesses across 11 metropolitan areas in four countries. We analyzed review valence and brand gender as independent variables and usefulness from Yelp reviews as the dependent variable. To operationalize brand gender, we coded reviews based on gender characteristics of the business name.

Across three studies using mixed methods, we demonstrate female brands are hurt more than male brands by negative information. In Study 1, we demonstrated how negative information leads to greater attitude change than positive information for real female (vs. male) brands, and this effect is mediated by trust change. Study 2 replicated these effects with fictional brands (to remove any brand-familiarity effects) and showed the perceived usefulness of a review depends jointly on review valence and brand gender; the results show that negative reviews were more useful than positive reviews for female brands, but these effects attenuated among male brands. In Study 3, we replicated the findings related to review usefulness with Yelp reviews.

While a significant amount of research shows gender discrimination in a variety of business contexts (e.g., Blau & Kahn, 2017; Tharenou, 2010), our work is the first to show empirical evidence of bias against female brands. The increased susceptibility of female (vs. male) brands to negative information is a significant contribution to our understanding of how brands are perceived in consumers’ minds. We show that not only human personality traits could transfer to brands as shown by Aaker (1997), but brand names can also trigger gender stereotypes.