Co-branding strategies? : assessing the influence of gender on consumer evaluations of new co-branded products

Co-branding strategies arise from the brands’ need to reinvent themselves and are commonly defined as an alliance between two brands in order to create a new product that will carry both brands’ names. The goal of our research is to assess the influence of brand gender on consumers’ evaluation of a new co-branded product. Previous studies have shown that consumers tend to choose brands that enhance their gender identity. Moreover, consumers associate human personality traits with brands, since they tend to see brands as if they were their family or friends. With the aim of studying this influence, we started by doing a pre-test in order to find out the brands that are more strongly associated to each gender, and more familiar among a list of brands belonging to two product categories – personal care and fashion. The results of the pre-test showed that the brands that have a more favorable relation between gender and familiarity are Axe, Dove, Levis, and Mango. Following we created two co-branding scenarios: Axe by Mango – targeting females – and Dove by Levis – targeting males. We collected data using and online survey. Our sample was composed mainly by students from different University classes in Porto and Faro. We started our analyses by doing a sociodemographic characterization of our sample and a brief descriptive statistical analysis. This was followed by reliability tests to measure the internal consistency of our variables. Finally, we used Linear Regressions to test our hypotheses. Our results show that brand gender has a significant and favorable influence on consumers’ attitude towards the new co-branded product, in the case of a masculine co-branding scenario