From Linguistics to Marketing : How does a grammatical gender shape a brand masculinity and femininity perception ?

Details

Supervisors

Kervyn de Meerendré Nicolas

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences de gestion

Abstract

This thesis will focus on two themes mainly, brand masculinity and femininity perception and grammatical gender. It is designed to gain more insight and understand the causal relationship that binds them in case there is one. In two studies, one that is based on a two-gendered language: French and a second one based on a three-gendered language: Romanian, we investigated the effect of grammatical gender on new brand’s gender perception, more specifically, on brand’s masculinity and femininity perceptions. French speakers (Study 1) and Romanian speakers (Study 2) were asked to judge a number of gendered brand names on five masculine and five feminine traits using a seven-point Likert scale. For the first study the results suggest that the different brands were ascribed different amounts of masculinity and femininity depending on the designated grammatical gender. A paired t-test analysis shows that the grammatically masculine brand was ascribed greater amounts of masculinity compared to its grammatically feminine counterpart and the grammatically feminine brand was seen as more feminine compared to masculine one. For the second study the brands were ascribed different amounts of masculinity and femininity depending on the designated grammatical gender. A paired t-test analysis showed that the grammatically masculine brand was ascribed greater amounts of masculinity compared to its grammatically feminine counterpart and the grammatically feminine brand was seen as more feminine compared to masculine brand and neutral gender brand. The difference between masculine and neutral logo was not significant.