Men resist men: streamer-consumer gender match for advertising the functional benefits of heterogeneously priced utilitarian products

Within the emerging live-streaming commerce context, streamer-consumer gender match has been considered an important topic in studies on advertising hedonic products. However, it is still under-explored how streamer-consumer gender match affects the mapping from functional benefits to advertising effectiveness when advertising utilitarian products and how the mechanism is contingent on heterogeneous price signals. To somewhat address the research gaps, we develop a number of hypotheses based on the elaboration likelihood model together with the price signaling mechanism and examine the research model drawing on a 28-day panel on 685 smartphones sold on Douyin Live Shopping. The empirical results indicate that (1) functional benefit performance has a positive effect on advertising effectiveness for utilitarian products with a middle-price signal, and the effect is stronger when the products are sold by male rather than female streamers; (2) also for advertising utilitarian products with a middle-price signal, male consumers resist male streamers when streamers leverage utilitarian information to stimulate consumers’ purchase intention; and (3) functional benefit performance contributes little to advertising effectiveness for utilitarian products with a high-price or low-price signal. The evidence uncovers that gender match mainly makes a difference to appending extra hedonic cues rather than amplifying the conversion of utilitarian information in the sense of advertising utilitarian products. The findings also highlight the risk of neglecting within-category heterogeneities in the by-product-category research on live-streaming advertising.