Feminine Brand Research Articles

Gender Dimensions of Brand Personality

Although masculinity and femininity are personality traits relevant to brands, their measurement and contribution to branding theory and practice have not been examined. This article describes the development and validation of a two-dimensional scale measuring masculine and feminine brand personality that is discriminant with regard to existing brand personality dimensions and scales measuring masculinity and femininity as human personality traits. This scale is applied to show that (1) spokespeople in advertising shape masculine and feminine brand personality perceptions; (2) brand personality-self-concept congruence in terms of masculine and feminine brand personality and consumers’ sex role identity positively influences affective, attitudinal, and behavioral brand-related consumer responses; and (3) masculine and feminine brand personality lends itself to the creation of brand fit in a brand extension context, which in turn leads to more positive brand extension evaluations and increased purchase intentions with regard to the extension.

“Guest of the Inmost Heart”:Conceptions of the Divine Beloved among Early Sufi Women

In the works of Sufi love mysticism, the Sufi seeker is often represented as a male lover in relation to God as the symbolically “feminine” Beloved. However, women themselves were not infrequently the practitioners of the mystical path in Islam, and it is clear from the words attributed to them that female Sufis developed their own image of the Divine Beloved as the symbolically masculine object of their female desire. In this paper, I examine short poetic pieces and sayings attributed to Sufi women in both hagiographical and biographical works in an attempt to identify a specifically feminine brand of Islamic “love” mysticism, reflecting a distinctly and traditionally female experience of loving and spiritual longing.