Gender, Emotions, and Judgments: An Analysis of the Moderating Role of Gender in Influencing the Effectiveness of Advertising and Pricing Tactics: An Abstract

There is an increasing theoretical and empirical evidence that gender affects consumers’ responses to marketing strategies. In the current study, we examined the influence of gender on the efficacy of two of the most important elements of the marketing mix, namely, the effectiveness of advertising and pricing strategies. Building on selectivity model (Meyers-Levy & Maheswaran, 1991; Meyers-Levy & Sternthal, 1991), we hypothesized that compared to men, women are more likely to process the information systematically and pay attention to details. Furthermore, we posited that such predisposition should increase women’s likelihood of identifying deceptive marketing strategies and reduce their susceptibility to such strategies. The results of three empirical studies showed that compared to men, women are (A) more likely to pay attention to details, (B) more likely to identify and negatively react to deceptive advertising claims, and (C) less likely to be influenced by the signaling effect of high prices.

Our studies make several theoretical and practical contributions. First, the findings illustrate the moderating role of gender on consumers’ price-quality perceptions. If men are more likely than women to use price to judge the quality, they will be less price sensitive. This is because of the dual role that price plays in influencing consumers’ perception of deal value (Zeithaml, 1988). Therefore, our findings suggest that a price signaling strategy will be more likely to increase revenues and profit when the target market is men rather than women. Second, our findings provide further support for selectivity model by showing that men and women adopt different thinking styles to process the available information in making product judgments. Third, our study shed more light on the role of gender on the effectiveness of different advertising tactics. Finally, our results have important practical implications. Our analysis suggests that different (even opposite) pricing and advertising strategies should be used for brands that could use gender as a segmentation variable.