Gender and Source Credibility: An Exploratory Perspective

Credibility’s role in persuasion has prompted a wealth of research that spans many disciplines and includes a variety of factors that may impinge on credibility. Credibility has been described as the doorway to persuasion. In the field of communication, credibility is a substantive part of persuasion research. Since marketing is largely concerned with persuasive appeals, source credibility should be of significant interest to academicians and practitioners in this area as well. Surprisingly, very little marketing research has been directed toward understanding this component of a persuasive communication, and much of what has been studied about source credibility and marketing has relied on unsupported truisms (Tybout 1978). As a topic of interest to researchers in marketing, communications, consumer behavior, and social psychology, it would seem that some definitive conclusions could be researched regarding the nature of source credibility. This paper looks at one area of credibility that has been largely ignored, gender’s possible effect on source credibility.