Look or sound like a winner? The effects of masculine and feminine gender cues in marketing videos

Abstract

Influencers often use digital technologies to enhance their face and voice gender in marketing videos with the aim of increasing their appeal and persuasive effects. However, little research has been conducted into how consumers respond to these cues. Drawing from multimodal communication and face–voice information processing research, we propose a framework to categorize and compare the effects of facial and vocal gender cues for men and women. Our findings from an empirical study and an online experiment reveal that congruent and incongruent gender cues provide either independent or related signals, depending on the gender and cue type. For female stimuli, incongruent cues independently contribute to an integrated response, while congruent cues produce a diminishing effect. The pattern is reversed for male stimuli, with congruent cues communicating independent messages and incongruent cues evoking a response based on voice only. Our study has important implications for e-marketers and communicators.