Gender effect of the brand name on the perception of consumers

The objective of this paper is to understand whether the grammatical gender termination of a brand name can have an effect on how the brand is perceived by consumers. The theoretical part of this paper describes the brand name as one of the main elements to have a good brand strategy and defends the fact that grammatical gender has an influence on abstract thought. Considering this, the fact of giving a brand name with certain gender features would influence how the brand is perceived by consumers. Moreover, having gender features within a brand name would make feel the consumer of this same gender closer to the brand. Our empirical research had as first objective to prove the hypothesis, based on the literature research, about the effect of the gender of a brand name on potential consumers’ perception. The second objective was to prove the effect of grammatical gender on thought. The empirical research includes two different experiments to analyse the hypothesis previously mentioned. The first experience was run on French native speakers and its aim was to see whether the termination by –a or –o had an effect on how people would perceive the brand, as having more feminine or masculine attributes. Nevertheless, the results of this experience failed to support our hypothesis. The second part of our empirical research focused on proving the effect of grammatical gender on abstract thought. For this experiment, two category of participants were chosen, one being French native speakers and the other category being Spanish native speakers. The idea was to compare several neutral items, having opposite grammatical gender in French and Spanish, to some masculine or feminine silhouettes. The objective was to see if, subconsciously, the grammatical gender would influence the thought of participants on how similar both representations were. In this case, the experience run on French speakers rejected any influence of grammatical gender on thought, whereas the experiment on Spanish speakers did not reject our hypothesis. No clear conclusions were drawn out of this second experiment.