The Effect of Brand Gender on Brand Equity—A Simple Fallacy?

Abstract

This chapter discusses the important question of whether the brand-gender–brand-equity model is a simple fallacy. This could be true for several reasons, such as missing invariance, particularly in cross-cultural studies, and common method or common source biases. Respective tests support the assumption that the global data were form-, metric-, and scalar-invariant, providing evidence that the model measured gender and equity consistently across all countries. The data presented in this book were assessed for brand genders and equities in only one common survey. This means that the same people rated gender and equity items. Since individuals have their own response styles, it could be that those who tended to give high ratings on scales did so for both gender and equity items. The same could hold for respondents who tended to give low ratings on scales. Because of this, a positive correlation between gender and equity could, in fact, be an invalid artifact. Several sophisticated tests provided evidence that such a common source bias could be widely excluded. Finally, for the first time, the claim that the assignment of human personality traits to brands is appropriate only if the personality traits load under the same factors for both humans and brands was tested. Gender scores were assessed not only for brands, but also for several human portraits. In a multi-group analysis, the same factors emerged and the measurements of brands and persons were invariant, supporting the overall validity of the brand-gender–brand-equity approach.