While functional and attribute orientation is used for product positioning, brand positioning is based on emotional associations. The process attempts to associate the brand on some unique emotional elements compared to competitors in the customer's perception. Brand gendering is a process of associating the brand with a gender for creating differentiation in the market place. This article looks into the process of positioning the brand on the basis of gender and explains the techniques in which gendering will work. It also draws the reader's attention to the strategic cautions on gendering brands. It highlights situations in which brand gendering will be favorable for the brand and in which situations, brand gendering should be avoided. This conceptual article analyzes the strategic alternatives of gendering a brand and its long-term implication for the brand.

Let us look at some of the advertisements, which are mostly recalled these days in automobile product marketing, particularly in the context of two-wheeler marketing. We have seen the Bajaj Pulsar campaign, which has a catch line, "definitely male". TVS Scooty carries an image of a brand meant for girls and young women. Brands have started centering themselves on core product propositions and are using dominant customer characteristics as their user imagery for building sustainable competitive advantage. Gendering a product or a brand simply means imbuing it with a masculine or a feminine image and identity. This form of strategic evaluation is linked to goods that may be purchased and used by both sexes. There are products like shaving cream, sanitary napkins meant for a particular gender and are known as gendered products. With gendered products, the visible design features, distribution, advertising and brand promotion are modified to include symbols and imageries, which identify the brand mainly with one gender.

The words and symbols that will identify the brand with one sex are those that give it a masculine or feminine appearance. This depends on the nature of the sex roles that culture and society ascribe to each sex (Hawkins and Coney, 1976). These gender positions are borrowed from the dominant stereotype of the men and women of the present generation (Courtney and Whipple, 1983). The contemporary sex role ascriptions and the masculine or feminine imagery that accompanies a brand helps in identifying and prescribing customers with the brand, while projecting what a man or woman should be like and what he or she should do in society (Gilly, 1988).

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