Services branding: is it a matter of gender?

Companies are investing heavily on branding to stimulate consumer’s involvement and attachment. In service environments such investments are particularly important because the brand is able to reduce consumer’s perceived uncertainty related to the high level of services’ intangibility. Companies then need guidelines to manage these brand-related activities successfully. Drawing on these premises, understanding the concept of brand personality and its dimensions is fundamental for successful brand positioning and brand management in general. While several of these dimensions have been deeply investigated by previous study, the gender trait (masculinity vs. femininity) has been overlooked for a long time and a specific scale for measuring this character has been developed only a few years ago, in 2009 by Grohmann. Moreover, only a few studies specifically analyze services brand personality, while most of available analyses consider consumer goods. The purpose of this paper is contribute to this stream of studies by assessing the validity of Grohmann’s scale among Italian consumers. Additionally, this study intends to evaluate whether the gender trait is able to differentiate services brands belonging to the same service industry. An empirical research was conducted on a sample of 200 consumers. Participants were asked to rate their perceptions of the masculinity vs. femininity dimensions of four different service brands (two brands of food retailers and two brands of airlines). The findings show that Grohmann’s scale reaches high levels of validity in the Italian context, as well and that femininity and masculinity measured by that scale are able to register differences in services brand positioning for brands belonging to the same service industry. From the findings some managerial insights for brand (positioning and repositioning) strategies are derived.