Cross-gender brand extension strategy in the beauty industry context

• Autor(a) principal: Kuksa, Yulia
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/29067
• topic: Cross-gender; Brand strategy; Brand extension; The beauty industry; Estratégia de marca; Extensão de marca; Indústria da beleza; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

In the pursuit of business leadership, companies are willing to enlarge their market share by attracting new customers. For this reason, one of the strategies which are widely used is the cross-gender brand extension. It implies extending the consumer target of traditionally male’s of female’s brands toward the opposite gender. The purpose of this thesis is to look at this strategy in the beauty industry context. It is a particularly challenging environment for applying the above concept because the whole industry has been associating and focusing on women for many years. The goal of the paper is to understand what are the key factors that ensure success and acceptance of the cross-gender extension. Using secondary data analysis from different scientific papers and primary data collection via an online survey as the main methodological tools, it was found out that, in general, women tend to accept extensions more favorably comparing to men, in the same time their willingness to pay is higher than men’s one. Moreover, gender role stereotypes still play a crucial role for acceptance and by now remain traditional, this should be taken into consideration for developing communication strategies. Even though the gender-neutral trend is spreading, consumers would prefer products or brands which can be associated with a particular gender. All this suggests that the cross-gender brand extension strategy as a whole is extremely effective and causes a positive response among buyers, even in the beauty industry context.