Conditioning of Meaning in Advertising: Brand Gender Perception Effects

Abstract

Advertising is a powerful tool for imbuing brands with meaning. Classical conditioning has been identified as an important theoretical mechanism for building such associations around brands. Although a number of conditioning studies have examined the conditioning of brand attitude, only recently has research turned toward whether or not inferential beliefs can be conditioned. This research adds to recent literature on the conditioning of beliefs by examining whether or not gender perception of brands can be conditioned. The study presented here is a 2×2 with one control group. The two factors are the overall valence of the US (either positive or neutral) and the gender affiliation of the US (either masculine or feminine). The results indicate that whether the CS (a brand of cologne) was paired with the masculine or feminine images affected subjects' subsequent gender perception of that brand. Additionally, evidence from this research suggests that the conditioning of beliefs (gender perception of brand) can occur independently of overall attitude.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 27 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.