When anthropomorphized brands push their gender boundaries
研究发现，拟人化品牌被赋予女性或男性性别后，若做出与性别不符的市场行为（如推出性别不一致的产品），女性品牌比男性品牌更易被视为不合适，从而处于劣势。
Abstract When anthropomorphized, brands are often imbued with gender. Consequently, when brands seen as female or male adopt marketplace behaviors that are incongruent with their gender, it can result in a perceived violation of expectations. We demonstrate that brands anthropomorphized as female versus male are stereotyped more strongly and draw lower fit perceptions when they engage in gender incongruent behaviors. We show that these asymmetric gender boundaries have implications for how consumers perceive and react to an anthropomorphized brand's marketplace behaviors, including the introduction of gender incongruent personality traits, product characteristics, and brand extensions. We find evidence for our proposed effect across both externally valid secondary data and internally valid experiments. In doing so, our work highlights how merely cuing female or male gender through anthropomorphism not only sets in motion a specific set of expectations from consumers, it also shapes the strength of these gender‐based expectations that place female brands at a disadvantage relative to male brands.