Chick Beer tried to entice weight-conscious women with the brew’s 97 calories and 3.5 carbs per bottle, “about the same as half of a carrot.” And Clutch, a brand of dryer sheets, encourages men to “grab your manliness,” promising that “girls will like the way your clothes smell, or we’ll refund your order.”

Gender-tailored marketing messages from these brands and others—including Mangria and Pink Power tools—are common, yet new research shows they can turn off consumers, particularly women. In fact, they often backfire to the point of dissuading women from choosing a product they would have considered if the company hadn’t hyped their gender, according to a study by Harvard Business School.

Why do these gender appeals alienate the very audience they aim to attract? People resist being categorized—or made to feel like they are unwillingly reduced to a single identity—particularly when the product they’re being nudged toward evokes a stereotype about their gender.

Suggesting that women will clamor for a product wrapped in pink packaging just because some marketer assumes that all women love pink can come across as downright insulting, says co-researcher Leslie K. John, the Marvin Bower Associate Professor at HBS.

“In a way, this project reminds me of my childhood,” John says, chuckling. “When I was a kid, I had a babysitter who said, ‘Leslie, your favorite color is pink.’ She would put pink bows in my hair. Everything had to be pink. This project is partly a reaction against this feeling that just because I’m a girl doesn’t mean I love pink! There’s something very off-putting about feeling like you’re being reduced to a single category of membership.”





The study’s findings are detailed in the working paper Calculators for Women: When Identity Appeals Provoke Backlash.

The paper was co-written by University of Virginia Assistant Professor Tami Kim, who was an HBS doctoral student, HBS Assistant Professor Kate Barasz, John, and Michael I. Norton, the Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration at HBS.

When gender labels fall flat

According to previous research, even stereotypes that cast people in a positive light—such as suggesting that women are kinder than men or that Asians excel in math—can trigger a negative reaction from these groups.

Some companies have learned this lesson the hard way. Consumers mocked BIC on Amazon after the company released its pink and purple “Pens for Her,” featuring a “thin barrel designed to fit a woman’s hand.” Shoppers blasted Target when a store labeled toys in one aisle “building sets” and those in another aisle “girls’ building sets.”

"Women were actually avoiding the very item that was trying to appeal to them."

Consumers criticized PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi for suggesting that Doritos might develop lady-friendly chips that are “low crunch” because women “don’t like to crunch too loudly in public”—an idea that never came to pass. Kleenex renamed its “Mansize” tissues “extra large” after 62 years in stores, following growing complaints that the branding was sexist. And Chick Beer didn’t seem to catch on, as the company no longer exists.

A gender-centered message also didn’t work well for presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. When supporters asked women to vote for her specifically because of their shared gender, many female voters balked.

Testing for gender backlash

To probe when and why identity labels backfire, the research team visited a college campus four months before the 2016 US presidential election and asked voters to choose a campaign item to keep.

In one group, participants were asked to select either a sticker or a button that featured the slogan “Hillary, the Candidate for America.” In a second group, participants chose between a sticker with that same slogan and a button with a different slogan: “Hillary, the Candidate for Women.”

When both items featured the same “candidate for America” slogan, people chose the button, which had more value. But in the second group, despite the button being worth more, women avoided the “candidate for women” slogan on it and chose the lower-value sticker instead.

“The moment you affix a gender identity label on the higher-value button, we see that people’s preference for the button goes down, suggesting that women were actually avoiding the very item that was trying to appeal to them,” Kim says.

In another study, the research team asked one group of participants to choose either a green or purple calculator to complete math problems, while in another group, they labeled purple calculators “for men” for male participants and “for women” for females. Among female participants, 51 percent chose the purple calculator when it had no gender labels, whereas significantly fewer, 24 percent, chose the purple one when it was labeled “for women.”

Interestingly, women in both groups told the researchers beforehand that they liked the color purple, but women rejected the purple calculators with labels, likely because it added the cloying assumption that all women like purple, John says.

“When the purple calculator isn’t labeled, it’s just a purple calculator, and women are more likely to choose it because as it turns out, they do have a slight preference for purple over green,” she says. “But as soon as you put the label on the calculator, women tend to avoid it. Marketers may think that just because I’m a woman, I’m going to like this purple calculator, so they add that label. But that’s aversive to women because it makes them feel reduced to a single identity.”

After all, Kim adds, “There are many other reasons that might lead us to like the color purple, besides just being a woman.”

Why gender labels irk women

In contrast, the men in the study were more inclined to choose the purple calculator with the “for men” label. In fact, gender labels threaten women more than men because women have long been marginalized by negative stereotypes, so they’re more sensitive to marketing that tries to put them in a box, the research team contends.

“These appeals can make consumers feel as if they are being viewed through a unidimensional lens,” Kim says.

In one study, female participants who believed that women were perceived unfavorably were more likely to avoid the purple calculators labeled “for women” and had a more intense negative reaction. “Those that feel more marginalized are more likely to reject gender labels,” Kim says.

Some marketers are moving away from gender-based strategies, for instance by no longer targeting only women in ads about household cleaning products, according to a recent Kantar study. Unilever and UN Women partnered in 2017 to fight gender stereotypes in ads. Some brands say they are intent on challenging these stereotypes, such as GoldieBlox, which created “the world’s first girl engineer character.”

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Gendered marketing can actually work for certain products. “Nobody balks at marketing vitamins for women and vitamins for men because, ostensibly, that makes sense; there’s a justifiable difference between the vitamins recommended for men and women,” Barasz says.

But the research team says, in general, companies should proceed carefully with gender labels, keeping in mind that if they bring stereotypes to mind, they won’t sit well with women. John recommends testing messages with small groups to see how they go over before launching larger marketing campaigns.

“In many cases, these labels are not smart marketing,” John says. “Companies might actually be depressing their demand for products. More subtle appeals might be the better way to go.”

About the Author

Dina Gerdeman is senior writer at Harvard Business School Working Knowledge.

[Image: duh84]

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