Parents aren’t likely to name their son Jessica or their daughter David. Likewise, when naming a product, companies must keep its gender in mind, says marketing Assistant Professor Eric Yorkston.

Depending on whether the brand name is masculine or feminine, it may clash with a product’s perceived sex. In a recent study published in the Journal of Consumer Research with co-author Gustavo E. de Mello, Yorkston found that when the gender of the brand name and the product clash, consumers are more likely to evaluate the brand negatively.

“Consumers know our brand name is supposed to tell us stuff; they know that a name is one of the tools a company is using to talk to them,” said Yorkston, who specializes in consumer psychology and linguistics. “Our language is set up to give us cues.”

The English language has a semantic gender system rather than a formal gender system — gender is assigned to an object based on meanings associated with it, as opposed to languages with a formal system, which assign gender based solely on the structural properties of the word signifying the object.

However, Yorkston found that English-speakers judge the masculinity or femininity of a brand name based on formal gender cues like those found in Spanish, Italian and other Romance languages.

In the study, fictitious brand names were assigned to alcoholic beverages and men¡¦s and women¡¦s footwear. Participants were asked to rate the products based solely on the brand names.

When beer, which is semantically a masculine object, had a feminine brand name like Aiza (the “a” ending is feminine in Spanish), the participants were less likely to remember the brand name or to rate it positively than when the beer had a masculine name like Aizo.

Considering the millions of dollars companies spend in developing or changing brand names, gender is nothing to scoff at. When a company wants to market a product to women, for instance, it tends to give that product a feminine name, Yorkston said. So Mizuno’s line of golf clubs for women is called Tava, and PowerBar calls its energy bar for women Pria.

But a gender match is just one of a multitude of factors that determine if a brand succeeds or fails, Yorkston said. If Toyota, for example, were having trouble marketing its Tacoma pickup, the feminine associations of the word “Tacoma” may be far less important than whether consumers associate Toyota with small, economical cars rather than big trucks.