The Impact of Brand Variance on Gender in FMCG Sector

Abstract

With the rapidly changing times and technology, more and more companies are moving towards brand extensions to acquire a competitive advantage. There are various factors enhancing brand equity while extending the brand into new categories like brand awareness, personality, lifestyle, relationship with the consumers, cultural differences among consumers and demographics. Demographic of a brand is the most important personality characteristic which leads to most easily extractable variables like gender, age and class. Gender plays a significant role in shaping the brand personality of a brand and its subsequent variants. (Levy, 1959). This chapter relies on the relationship between gender based brand personality and brand equity drawn from the study titled “The effect of Brand Gender on Brand Equity”. (Lieven, 2014). This research paper concludes that brand androgyny (masculinity or femininity of the brand) was negatively related to brand associations i.e., brand equity is not influenced by gender associations related to the brand or the product category. So, this chapter explores whether there is a relationship between gender and different variants of the brand. Also, should advertisers design gender focused messages for the different brand variants. The methodology chosen for this research is quantitative in nature. The independent variable in this research is gender and the dependent variable is brand variance. This research paper shows that there is no impact of brand variants on gender. Advertisements need to be designed in a manner that target both males and females psychologically rather that demographically especially gender based.