Why are men less likely than women to embrace environmentally friendly products and behaviors? Whereas prior research attributes this gender gap in sustainable consumption to personality differences between the sexes, we propose that it may also partially stem from a prevalent association between green behavior and femininity, and a corresponding stereotype (held by both men and women) that green consumers are more feminine. Building on prior findings that men tend to be more concerned than women with gender-identity maintenance, we argue that this greenfeminine stereotype may motivate men to avoid green behaviors in order to preserve a macho image. A series of seven studies provides evidence that the concepts of greenness and femininity are cognitively linked and shows that, accordingly, consumers who engage in green behaviors are stereotyped by others as more feminine and even perceive themselves as more feminine. Further, men's willingness to engage in green behaviors can be influenced by threatening or affirming their masculinity, as well as by using masculine rather than conventional green branding. Together, these findings bridge literatures on identity and environmental sustainability and introduce the notion that due to the green-feminine stereotype, genderidentity maintenance can influence men's likelihood of adopting green behaviors.

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Although academics and practitioners have embraced customer engagement as a major objective of marketing, the conceptualization and measurement of engagement is challenging. Prior research largely has relied on conventional "one-size-fits-all" measures with a fixed set of scale items. The current, more flexible approach measures engagement based on context-specific experiences that can vary across brands and products. Three studies examining engagement when consuming (a) live jazz music, (b) newspapers, and (c) television programming provided evidence that a flexible approach to measuring engagement can help predict consumer behavior. The third of these studies also provided new evidence that engagement with television programming increases advertising effectiveness.• Most conventional measures of engagement take a "one-size-fits-all" approach by generating a fixed set of scale items.• The authors instead suggest a flexible approach for measuring engagement based on qualitatively rich, context-specific experiences that can vary across brands and products.• This flexible-measurement approach is well suited to the engagement construct and highly predictive of consumption behavior, sometimes more so than traditional fixed-scale measures such as satisfaction.• In addition to monitoring satisfaction, marketers should develop and study engagement metrics (ideally by focusing on experiences that relate to consumers' goals) to attain a multifaceted understanding of their customers. INtroDuCtIoNOver the past 15 years, the construct of engagement has gathered considerable momentum as a way of expanding marketers' insight into consumers. • Engagement is a multilevel, multidimensional construct that emerges from the thoughts and feelings about one or more rich experiences involved in reaching a personal goal.• Having different experiences makes engagement multidimensional. The aggregate of the experiences is the second-order engagement construct, making it multilevel.The current authors conducted three studies that identified five broad categories of experiences that may constitute engagement:• Interaction (to connect with others),• Transportation (to escape or become diverted),• Discovery (to gain insight, knowledge, or skills),• Identity (to affirm or express one's identity), and• Civic Orientation (to contribute to society). March 2016 JOURNAL OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH 41how to CAPturE CoNSuMEr ExPErIENCES: A CoNtExt-SPECIfIC APProACh to MEASurINg ENgAgEMENt Thearf.org It is important to note, however, that these categories did not comprise an exhaustive, fixed checklist for engagement. Consistent with the notion of "context-specific expression" (Brodie et al., 2011), the specific experiences that contribute to engagement would vary depending on the type of domain, product category, and brand under investigation.Further, because engagement is context specific, the current authors did not expect high levels of all five of the experience categories for engagement to emerge.For example, experiences that are high in "transp...

Consumers often dispose of used products by selling them in a secondary market (e.g., classified advertisements, Craigslist, eBay). When consumers must dispose of products to which they feel emotionally attached, they often expect to sell the product at a price in excess of its market value. However, the authors identify a condition in which product attachment can decrease rather than increase the minimum price sellers are willing to accept. Specifically, they propose that due to concern for how products are used following a transaction, strongly attached sellers may be more willing than weakly attached sellers to provide discounts to potential buyers whose usage intentions are deemed appropriate. Whereas prior research has focused primarily on one particular consequence of attachment, namely, the intensified reluctance of consumers to part with their possessions, this research identifies a novel consequence of attachment: a heightened sensitivity to the manner in which the product will be used following a transaction. Four empirical studies provide converging evidence that sellers' product attachment determines the extent to which their minimum acceptable sales price is influenced by buyer usage intent. the three anonymous JM reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. Stephen Nowlis served as area editor for this article.

As consumers move through their decision journey, they adopt different goals (e.g., transactional vs. informational). In this research, the authors propose that consumer goals can be detected through textual analysis of online search queries and that both marketers and consumers can benefit when paid search results and advertisements match consumer search–related goals. In bridging construal level theory and textual analysis, the authors show that consumers at different stages of the decision journey tend to assume different levels of mental construal, or mindsets (i.e., abstract vs. concrete). They find evidence of a fluency-driven matching effect in online search such that when consumer mindsets are more abstract (more concrete), consumers generate textual search queries that use more abstract (more concrete) language. Furthermore, they are more likely to click on search engine results and ad content that matches their mindset, thereby experiencing more search satisfaction and perceiving greater goal progress. Six empirical studies, including a pilot study, a survey, three lab experiments, and a field experiment involving over 128,000 ad impressions provide support for this construal matching effect in online search.

Long lists of ranked items, such as Bloomberg Businessweek's rankings of MBA programs, are ubiquitous in Western culture, and they are often used in consumer decision making. Six studies show that consumers mentally subdivide ranked lists into a smaller set of categories and exaggerate differences between consecutive items adjacent to category boundaries. Further, despite prior work suggesting that people might subjectively produce place-value categories (e.g., single digits, the twenties), this research shows that consumers interpret ranked lists by generating round-number categories ending in zero or five (e.g., top 10, top 25). Thus, for example, consumers will more favorably evaluate improvements in rank that cross round-number-category boundaries (e.g., shifting from rank 11 to rank 10) than improvements in rank that cross place-value-category boundaries (e.g., shifting from rank 10 to rank 9). This phenomenon, labeled the top-ten effect, occurs because round numbers are cognitively accessible to consumers due to their prevalent use in everyday communication. L ong lists of ranked items are ubiquitous in Western culture. For example, each December, Car and Driver magazine lists the 10 best-performing cars and the 10 worst-performing cars of the year. Bloomberg Businessweek magazine publishes biennial rankings, listing the top 25 business schools. Billboard magazine publishes a weekly "Hot 100" list, a ranking of the sales and airplay of popular songs. Further, highly publicized ranked lists are not a new phenomenon. In 1930, the Chicago Tribune published an article that ranked Chicago's 28 most prominent and influential gangsters, and it placed the notorious gangster Al Capone atop the list, making him "public enemy number one" (Bergreen 1994).

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Scholars have historically assumed that consumers' persuasion knowledge is invariably linked to skepticism about advertising and marketing. As a result, studies have often used skepticism-focused stimuli to prompt persuasion knowledge access. However, as originally conceptualized, persuasion knowledge also includes an understanding of persuasion tactics that are trusted and believed, which suggests that accessing persuasion knowledge does not necessarily make consumers more skeptical. In this paper, we propose that, for at least some persuasion knowledge research questions, skepticism-focused interventions may be too "one-sided" because they bias participants to consider only the skeptical side of persuasion knowledge. The purpose of the present research is to test whether the "one-sided" persuasion knowledge interventions that are used in persuasion knowledge research encourage skepticism more than balanced interventions that focus consumers on the negative and positive motives that may underlie persuasive communication. Across three experiments with three distinct subject pools and over 2,500 participants, we demonstrate that one-sided versus balanced manipulations of persuasion knowledge can have differential effects on consumer skepticism. This is an important finding because skepticism-focused operationalizations are frequently employed in persuasion knowledge research.