Can dissimilarity in product category be an opportunity for cross-gender brand extension?

Tsunwai Wesley Yuen, Marzena Nieroda, Hongwei He and Yunseul Park

Journal of Business Research, 2021, vol. 135, issue C, 348-357

Abstract: Leveraging cross-gender brand extensions (new product offerings under the same brand name for customers of the opposite sex) can facilitate brand growth. However, how such strategies should be implemented remains unanswered. A popular approach is to launch a brand extension in the same or a similar product category (high fit). However, for cross-gender brand extension, this strategy can dilute the gender personality of the parent brand (i.e. masculinity or femininity). We propose that launching cross-gender brand extensions in a product category with low fit is an effective strategy as it enables cognitive distancing of the extension from the parent brand. Two experiments confirm that introducing low (versus high) fit cross-gender brand extensions mitigate the parent brand’s gender personality dilution, leading to more positive evaluations of the parent brand amongst existing customers and higher purchase intention amongst new target customers for the cross-gender brand extension.

Keywords: Cross-gender brand extension; Gendered branding; Product category fit; Brand gender personality dilution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296321004483
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jbrese:v:135:y:2021:i:c:p:348-357

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2021.06.035

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Research is currently edited by A. G. Woodside

More articles in Journal of Business Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().