Gendered Brand Cues and Sustainability Perceptions: Exploring the Role of Brand Gender in Consumer Sustainability Judgments

Abstract

While sustainability is a key consideration for many consumers, discerning a brand’s sustainability is too complex for routine consumption choices, often leading people to rely on irrelevant cues. Perhaps one such cue is the perceived gender of products and brands. Building on existing literature which suggests an association between environmentally conscious behavior and femininity (Brough et al., 2016), the present research explores whether gendered brand cues influences consumers’ perceptions of the brand’s sustainability, and in so doing impacts their purchase intentions and attitudes toward the brand. We conducted a preregistered study with 600 participants to investigate the causal impact of brand gender on sustainability perceptions. Using a 2 x 3 between-subjects design, participants were either primed to report their own green consumption values or not and then randomly assigned to one of three conditions: masculine, feminine, or neutral (control). Each participant was presented with a coffee brand where the brand's gender was manipulated through semantic (e.g., brand name) and visual (e.g., packaging) cues. When primed with a sustainability cue, participants who saw the feminine-branded product viewed it as significantly more sustainable than the neutral (control) condition (p=.007) and marginally more sustainable than the masculine-branded product (p=.070). We also found that across all conditions, sustainability perceptions predicted purchase intentions (p<.001) These findings suggest a potential relationship between the gender of a product’s branding and the extent to which the brand is perceived as sustainable. This research not only provides insights for marketers to strategically position products to align with eco-conscious consumer values but also contributes to the broader literature on how consumers form sustainability judgments about products, highlighting the subtle influence of gendered branding in this process.