Message framing to encourage sustainable fashion consumption : the interaction of materialism and gender

• Autor(a) principal: Nägele, Christian
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/25541
• topic: Message framing; Materialism; Gender; Encourage sufficiency; Fashion; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

In an era of fashion overconsumption, resources both human and natural are being exploited, and the question is raised on how to confront the abrupt growth of social and environmental problems. As fashion-related issues are geographically too far in distance for the daily consumer to properly register, social marketers need to address topics that are more easily perceivable to initiate change. This dissertation examines the impact of message framing on different consumer attitudes. For this purpose, gender and materialism are acting as moderators in a three-way interaction study. This current study aims to add value to the emerging field of behavioral economics and in particular to loss aversion theory. Furthermore, the author wishes to contribute useful learnings on the topics of gender and materialism studies and, most importantly, create an effective tool for social marketers to promote sustainable fashion consumption. The findings suggest that message framing has no main effects on consumer attitudes unless gender and materialism are being introduced as impactful moderators to the study design. Then, people high in materialism show significant gender differences. High materialistic female participants are more responsive to loss-framed messages, while high materialistic male participants are more sensitive to gain-framed messages. However, the findings also suggest that the two gender types are drawn by different motivations. These outcomes highlight the relevance of message framing combined with gender and materialism studies and show how these techniques can have a real impact when used precisely.