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With rapidly changing marketing landscape, nowadays, the formulation of various marketing strategies is increasingly focused on how consumers tend to make decisions. To meet the highly demanding consumer expectations, market segmentation can be used as an important marketing strategy. Due to gender marketing concept familiarity in the contemporary world, gender difference is one of the reference features in the process of market segmentation for marketers. This research is aimed to examine various determining factors that foster consumer purchase decision-making and the differences between consumers of different genders while making shopping and purchase decisions with special reference to an emerging economy, i.e. Pakistan.

Based on a cross-sectional sample of 367 consumers, the study adapted Sproles and Kendall's (1986) Consumer Style Inventory (CSI) to scrutinize the decision-making of both genders in Pakistan. For data analysis, the exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis in addition to the structural equation modeling has been used.

The study emphasized that, with the exception of quality awareness, brand consciousness, fashion consciousness, option overload and price consciousness greatly affect buying decisions. In addition, when it comes to consumer purchase decision-making, significant gender variations were discovered for both fashion consciousness and price consciousness.

Drawing upon the distinctive cultural characteristics of Pakistan and its people, in-depth research was conducted on purchasing behaviors of Pakistani consumers and the decision-making characteristics of customers of different genders were summarized. The outcomes are expected to make a significant contribution to the field of gender marketing by organizations.

The purpose of this paper was to examine the difference in the effect on external marketing effectiveness of gender similar boards and gender dissimilar boards in the agro-manufacturing industry in Zimbabwe.

Based on a multi-item construct of external marketing effectiveness, data were gathered from 56 agro-manufacturing firms. The significant differences in the effect of marketing activities designed by male, gender-diverse and female boards on the level of external marketing effectiveness of the firms were examined using MANOVA.

The results suggest significant differences on the levels of external marketing effectiveness between all female boards and all male and gender-diverse boards. Female boards indicated high levels of external marketing effectiveness on customer-perceived value, loyalty, satisfaction, brand performance and symbolic meaning. The study concludes that marketing effectiveness will only be achieved by firms that develop relevant marketing strategies for the female consumer market.

The sample for this research was drawn from agro-manufacturing firms in Zimbabwe. Therefore, the applicability of these findings to other countries should be done with caution. In addition, the sample for the research was rather small, with only a few female boards. If conducted with a larger sample, the results could be different. The developed scale to measure external marketing effectiveness may require to be tested by other researchers in different settings to confirm its applicability in measuring the construct in multiple settings.

Prior research shows that corporate board effectiveness has tended to be measured in terms of corporate financial performance. This research measures board effectiveness from the extent to which its gender composition has an effect on the ability of manufacturing firms to serve emerging needs of female consumers.

From the early 1990s a number of papers advocating feminist analyses of marketing phenomena appeared in the marketing literature. Scholars working from feminist perspectives in other disciplines have examined marketing phenomena for some time. Provides a guide to this literature, highlighting the scope of the work and its diversity, and suggests areas where more research is needed.

The topics of gender and sustainability are firmly anchored within a social discourse. Based on both factors, customers are placing demands on companies and have specific ideas on how they should be represented in advertising. The case study presented herein combines these two topics and examines the portrayal of gender in the external marketing communication of the fair fashion label ARMEDANGELS. By analysing individual Instagram publications, the case study identifies how the topic is generally portrayed on the company’s channel. Furthermore, the perspectives of customers are determined through conducted interviews. When comparing the two sides, it becomes apparent that customers mostly approve of the attempt to break with conservative gender roles as well as an equal representation of the male and female personas. In addition to expanding the theoretical considerations of the triple bottom line as well as the S-O-R model, we derive recommendations for ARMEDANGELS and for other companies in the fashion industry. For customer retention purposes, companies should therefore focus on aligning the sexes, breaking with the general gender binary and integrating LGBTQ+ communities in future marketing measures.

to examine consumers' perceptions of retail brand representations of gender-oriented and/or sexuality-oriented identities. The authors explore the value of developing more progressive, inclusive brand values to support more effective retail brand communications and imagery.

Photo elicitation, utilising LGBTQIA+/sexuo-gendered imagery from retail brand marketing communications, facilitated discussion within focus groups representing various genders, age generations and sexualities.

Younger generations indicate a preference for fluid gender and sexuality and endorse retail brands that represent this progressive understanding. Gender and age moderate preferences for representative imagery, with older males more resistant to sexuo-gendered messages and females of all ages more accepting.

The research is limited in generalisability, geography and demographics. The focussed approach did, however, enable collection of rich, insightful data to underpin evaluations of communicative brand values.

The inclusion of diverse and fluid sexuo-gendered identities within the brand values of retailers would enable effective targeting of consumers across a range of more traditional cohorts.

The evolving ideology towards inclusiveness, identified within the generational cohorts, demonstrates social change through progressive acceptance of more fluid gendered and sexual identities.

The research adopts a novel approach to examining diverse, sexuo-gendered imagery within gendered and generational cohorts, offering qualitative examples of a progressive social ideology.

Social cognitive theory suggests that children may have more favorable attitudes toward food products promoted by media characters who are similar to them, in terms of factors such as age, gender and race-ethnicity. This paper aims to profile the characters in food and beverage websites and apps for children and examine whether the healthfulness of promoted products varies as a function of character background.

This study includes two parallel content analyses focused on websites and apps that were produced by America’s top selling food and beverage companies.

There were very few child-targeted websites and apps, but those that existed were replete with media characters. These websites/apps tended to feature media characters with diverse gender, age and racial–ethnic backgrounds. However, marketing featuring adult and male characters promoted particularly unhealthy foods.

American food companies, many of whom signed voluntary self-regulatory pledges through the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, should make a more concerted effort to refrain from featuring appealing media characters in child-directed new media marketing. Whether conscious or not, it seems as if food marketers may be leveraging characters to appeal to a wide audience of children of varied demographic backgrounds.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this manuscript is the only research to focus specifically on the demographic profiles (i.e. gender, age and race-ethnicity) of characters in food websites and the nutritional quality of the products they promote. It is also the first to systematically examine media characters in food apps in any capacity.

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to demonstrate an understanding of:

A dualistic approach to femininity and masculinity as determining a demographic profile that is progressively outdated.

Prescribed gendered characteristics and roles that have evolved over recent centuries.

Technological platforms that have enabled voicing of non-conforming identities and supported the challenging of patriarchal societal constructs.

Marketing’s provision of social commentary on gender and sexuality and its potential to advance societal integration of diverse identities to reflect sexuo-gendered discourse.

Using the example of LEGO Friends, we investigate the discourses that develop when second-order consumers attribute moral weight to the production and marketing of toys perceived to sharpen and enforce gender norms.

We analyze reactions to LEGO Friends through a discourse analysis of online data collected from English-language blogs and news sites. The data is coded iteratively within the two primary categories of gender and the market.

We argue that children’s toys have reemerged as a moral battlefield where consumers stake out positions on the feminization and sexualization of young girls, forcing companies to take strong ideological stances while competing for market share. We show that in the debate over LEGO Friends, consumers’ discursive constructions of moral play were embedded in a heteronormative middle-class ideal that discourages expressions of stereotypical femininity.

Our data is limited to a number of online forums blogs and web sites. We do not claim to have exhaustively catalogued the reactions to LEGO Friends, but merely to have explored discursive positions staked by consumers in the unfolding debate.

This research shows that companies can benefit from addressing second-order consumers’ negotiations of brand meanings in their marketing research and campaigns, and thus avoid becoming the next target of a moral panic.

Our paper addresses brand meaning negotiations by second-order consumers, in this case buyers of children’s toys.

This paper aims to investigate the role of gender in the association of relationship marketing underpinnings (namely trust, commitment, communication, and conflict handling) with customer loyalty.

Data for the research were collected through a survey of customers of banks in Malaysia. Hierarchical Multiple Regression Analysis (HMRA) was used to estimate the moderation effect of gender in the RM‐customer loyalty relationship.

The results show that the four underpinnings of relationship marketing are directly associated with customer loyalty. Significant gender difference exists in the trust‐loyalty relationship. Women are significantly more loyal than men at higher levels of trust in the bank. Gender does not moderate the relationship between commitment, communication, conflict handling and loyalty.

The research focuses on banking services; further research in other sectors may be necessary before generalization can be made on the entire service industry. In this study, gender plays an important role in customer loyalty. Female customers tend to be more loyal than male customers when the bank is highly trustworthy.

Banks should increasingly demonstrate that they are trustworthy in order to keep customers loyal, more so female customers. They should also be committed to service, communicate effectively and handle conflicts well.

Although there are studies on relationship marketing and customer loyalty, research on gender roles is very limited. By contributing to the body of knowledge in this area, this research adds significant value. Moreover, the study presents valuable information on the market behaviour of customers in Malaysia, which may be unfamiliar to many readers.

This paper aims to examine the association of relationship marketing variables (namely trust, commitment, communication, and conflict handling) with overall firm‐customer relationship quality between male and female customers of Malaysian banks.

Data were colleted through a field survey of randomly selected bank customers in Malaysia. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis (HMRA) was employed for data analysis.

The results show that relationship marketing explains a significant amount of variance in overall firm‐customer relationship quality. Except for communication, all the independent variables are significantly associated with perceived firm‐customer relationship quality. No significant gender differences were observed.

The quality of firm‐customer relationship is important in customer retention and loyalty. There are efforts to understand the relationship marketing variables that drive overall relationship quality, but whether this relationship is generic or differs between males and females is unknown. The paper provides this insight.