Gendered Endorsers' Impact on Consumers' Subconscious Visual Attention Using Eye-Tracking

Gender-based marketing cues continue to have an important role in product design, UX/UI design, packaging, and marketing. Product endorsers represent one such gender-based marketing cue where existing research reports contradictory findings regarding its intended effectiveness in a world of shifting gender-based preferences. In a fully randomized, within-subject experiment with 30 GenZ college students, we use the eye-tracking methodology to evaluate the impact of two gendered product endorsers (men and women) on the subconscious visual attention of participants by gender. Four metrics were used to evaluate two sets of visual attention hypotheses so that more (a) dwell time %, (b) fixation count, and (c) fixation duration are associated with greater/more visual attention while lower (d) time to first fixation (TTF) is linked to greater attention as an indicator of attention allocation sequence (importance). Our study finds that gendered endorsers do make an intended impact on consumers' visual attention across viewers' genders; however, the subconscious attention for same-gender endorsers is much more pronounced for women, while men first fixate (notice) on oppositegender before shifting attention to same-gender endorsers.