Purpose: Despite the proliferation of casual advergames on web sites, there is relatively little scientific evidence on which product‐placement qualities and individual consumer characteristics allow a positive affect transfer from game to brand. The purpose of this paper was to examine the influence of placement conspicuousness, exposure duration, and player gender in an experiment with Spanish‐speaking adolescents under real‐world conditions.Design/methodology/approach: Three versions of a casual advergame were created and posted on the popular web site www.jetix.es. Two of the versions embedded ads for M&M chocolate candy, each of which had a different degree of conspicuousness (less versus more conspicuous), and the third version showed no brand placement at all and was used as the control condition. The versions were randomly assigned to 405 participants, and changes in their attitudes to M&Ms were measured.Findings: The positive affect induced by the casual advergame transferred to M&Ms when it was not inhibited by negative reactions to the brand placement. The transfer of affect occurred after both a brief exposure to the prominent placement and a long exposure to the subtle placement, but no transfer was observed under the opposite set of conditions. Significant transfer in female adolescents but the absence of transfer in their male counterparts suggests a strong gender bias.Practical implications: There are two implications for marketers who want to persuade adolescents through casual advergames. First, these marketers should segment their casual advergames by designing subtle placements for games with lasting appeal and prominent placements for games with brief appeal. Second, to strengthen male adolescents' brand preferences, marketers should not focus on casual advergames but search for more appropriate entertainment vehicles.Originality/value: The theoretical framework relies on an unprecedented combination of classical conditioning and psychological reactance theories. The results are of interest for marketers trying to persuade adolescents as well as for public policy advocates trying to protect this vulnerable target group.

What is going on with environmental education, which is currently unable to promote pro-environmental behaviors as effectively as it promotes pro-environmental attitudes? A tentative answer is that the environmental attitude–behavior gap observed in some individuals is just one manifestation of their lack of self-control for maintaining consistency in many life spheres. In the absence of prior empirical evidence, intuition suggests that the environmental attitude–behavior gap does not appear isolated but rather interconnected to other individual inconsistencies, while a rational approach suggests that self-control (i.e. capacity to perform consistent actions) plays an important role in explaining the environmental attitude–behavior gap within the framework of the theory of planned behavior. Using data collected in Spain, we found that four individual inconsistencies (concerning fast food, alcoholic beverages, pre-cooked meals, and diet products) made an important contribution to the explanation of the environmental attitude–behavior gap, revealing a remarkable connection between personal and environmental health care. These findings suggest the importance of focusing education efforts on strengthening students’ self-control in order to make them more capable of being consistent in all life endeavors.

Aims to demonstrate, from a marketing and market segmentation point of view, the need to adapt the construct of the family life cycle to the particular features of the Spanish social environment, given the obvious differences in the structure of Spanish households in relation to the USA. From this marketing and cross‐cultural approach, a review of the literature has been conducted on the evolution of the construct and the most significant models that have been arising as the outcome of that evolution. A new life cycle model has been designed reflecting these particular features. Also, on the basis of data taken from the Family Budgets Survey, the capacity of the adapted model has been analysed for predicting household expenditure in comparison with the main US models and the most habitual socioeconomic variables, and for detecting market segments with different needs. The results obtained show the utility of the construct adapted, both as a segmentation variable and as a predictor, together with the typical socioeconomic variables that explain household expenditure. The practical and academic utility of the model from a marketing approach, its potential adaptation to the Mediterranean European environment, and the main methodological limitation of the research are also discussed.