The Effect of Congruence of Visual Gender Cues and Grammatical Gender of a Product on Consumer Behaviour.

Abstract

Whether an object is assigned masculine or feminine grammatical gender influences how male- or female-like the object is perceived. Research on consumer behaviour indicates that congruence between gender cues, e.g. the morphological endings of brand names and the grammatical gender of an object leads to a more positive brand attitude. In the current study a questionnaire was sent to native speakers of German and native speakers of English asking them to evaluate eight fictional advertisements depicting a man or a woman with a product whose grammatical gender was either congruent with the sex of the model or not. No significant difference between the Germans and native speakers of English was found, which suggests that the influence of German grammatical gender was not strong enough to influence evaluations of advertisements. In summary, this study was not able to provide evidence for such linguistic relativity.