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Introduction
Product involvement is regarded as a general attitude concerning the importance of a product to a consumer (Ahtola, 1985), which is mainly a function of its frequency of purchase, social and economic risk and cost (Nkwocha et al., 2005). Understanding the role of product involvement in the brand formation process by gender is theoretically important as an answer to whether men and women are inherently different in their brand preference considerations (Dennis and McCall, 2005).
Gender refers to the psychological attributes associated with physiology that are socially constructed in an individual’s identity (Bem, 1974, 1981; Spence and Helmreich, 1978). There is evidence suggesting that it is a more robust concept than convention conveys (Campbell et al., 2004). Although this construct is broader than a solely physiological categorization, marketers commonly use demographic gender information as a singular biological descriptor (Spence and Sawin, 1985; Ye and Robertson, 2012). In effect, a physical characteristic is used as a proxy for psychological characteristics (Ye and Robertson, 2012).
The evolutionary theory explains why physical descriptors are believed to be related to psychological differences. Psychological gender differences based on biological physical descriptors originated as a function of the division of labor between the genders millions of years ago (Saad and Gill, 2000). For men, survival was dependent on becoming good hunters and finding a fertile mate, whereas women needed to excel at gathering food for the family, which allowed them to raise offspring into adulthood. This difference in goals led women to be more caring and men to be more target oriented (Brown, 2004). The dominant theory of gender is the classical differences model, based on the idea that men and women are vastly different psychologically because of sociobiological processes (Swani et al., 2013). The effect of their different biological programming as evolutionary gatherers and hunters has been extended to the context of purchasing behavior (Dennis and McCall, 2005). For example, women were found to have more positive attitudes toward shopping than men (Kuruvilla et al., 2009). Furthermore, according to this theory, to demonstrate their symbolic economic power, men purchase items that position them favorably in competition with other men and reflect their prowess as hunters (Dennis and McCall, 2005). Empirical research to date has...