Masculine men do not like feminine wording: the effectiveness of gendered wording in health promotion leaflets in the UK

Baxter, Katherine Jane and Czarnecka, Barbara and Schivinski, Bruno and Massaro, Maria Rita (2022) Masculine men do not like feminine wording: the effectiveness of gendered wording in health promotion leaflets in the UK. PLoS ONE. ISSN 1932-6203

Text PONE-D-21-39397R2_FTC (1) Authors copy.docx - Accepted Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (211kB)

Abstract

Following mixed-methods sequential design and drawing on the message-audience congruence concept and homophily theory, across three studies in the UK, we examined the effect of gendered wording and endorser’s gender on the effectiveness of leaflets promoting walking. In Study 1, a mall-intercept study achieved 247 completed questionnaires. Results demonstrated that men and women indicated the highest behavioural intentions for communal wording presented by a male endorser. However, pairwise comparisons revealed that when the wording of the advert was agentic and the endorser was male, males indicated significantly higher scores of behavioural intentions compared with females. Attitude towards the ad for women was highest for communal wording/female endorser; for men it was for agentic wording/male endorser. In Study 2, consumers’ views towards the gendered content were explored in 20 semi-structured interviews. In study 3 we examined the impact of the respondent’s gender role identity on gendered content effectiveness. Overall, when controlled for level of gender role identity, only masculine males evaluated leaflets featuring communal wording negatively which suggests that wording matters only for masculine males, but not for other men and women. Theoretically, we identified that gender-based message-respondent congruence is not a necessary aspect of communications to be effective, except for one group: masculine males. Our study identified dominant gender role identity as a factor that explained respondents’ preferences for presented stimuli. Specifically, males who display masculine gender role identity differ in evaluations of communal wording from all other groups. Social and commercial marketers who target men and women with exercise-related services should consider the use of agentic wording endorsed by a male endorser when targeting masculine men to increase the likelihood of eliciting positive attitudes towards the communication. However, such distinctions should not be associated with differences in women’s evaluations or men who do not report masculine gender role identity.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information and Comments:	© 2022 The Authors. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Keywords:	gendered wording, endorser’s gender, health communication
Faculty / Department:	Faculty of Business, Law and Criminology > Liverpool Hope Business School
Depositing User:	Katherine Baxter
Date Deposited:	03 Nov 2022 16:37
Last Modified:	03 Nov 2022 16:37
URI:	https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/3671

Actions (login required)

View Item