The Effect and Moderation of Gender Identity Congruity: Utilizing 'Real Women' Advertising Images

Abstract

The Financial Times recently reported that Nike is jumping on the real women bandwagon, using more ordinary women as opposed to flawless models in their advertising campaigns. Along with Nike, many companies have identified that some women experience negative effects by comparing themselves to highly attractive models in advertising, producing a negative impact on advertising effectiveness (Bower & Landreth, 2001). Advertising practitioners go to great lengths to design advertisements with female images that women consumers can easily identify with. On this basis, determining whether female advertising images that are congruent with female consumers' views of themselves can improve advertising effectiveness is a timely endeavor. Gender identity congruity refers to the extent to which structural correspondence is achieved between the entire configuration of a gender image in the advert and the configuration specified by a consumer's schema or beliefs (Orth & Holancova, 2004). According to the principle of cognitive consistency, individuals value harmony among their thoughts, feelings and behavior and are willing to maintain consistency between these elements (Solomon, 1992). Congruity of gender identity may be particularly germane in advertising to female target markets. Researchers have appraised the positive impact of the congruity between consumers' self-concept and advertising appeals on attitude and purchase intention (Hong & Zinkhan, 1995) and between self-concept and brand image on the liking of the brand (Dolich, 1969) and on purchase intention (Landon, 1974). As gender identity is a dimension of one's self-concept, it is reasonable to expect that increasing the amount of gender congruent information contained in an advertisement will facilitate the processing of this information and even improve the rating of the arguments (Worth et al., 1992). Surprisingly, past research in advertising has paid little attention to the impact of gender identity congruity on advertising effectiveness (for a review see Wolin, 2003). Thus, this paper examines the unique predictive ability of gender identity in explaining women's response to advertising (Jaffe, 1991; 1994). The contributions of this paper are twofold: (1) to demonstrate whether advertisements that are congruent with female consumers' gender identity elicit strong positive consumer reactions and (2) to identify the factors that may moderate/mediate the impact of gender identity congruity on female consumer responses to advertisements.