A Nine-Item Scale Shows How Engaged Consumers Are With Climate Change

Companies and governments say they want consumers to shop with the climate in mind. Measuring whether that is happening has been harder. A new paper in the Journal of Business Research offers a tool for the job: a nine-item scale of consumers’ climate change engagement.

Linda Alkire, Associate Professor of Marketing at the McCoy College of Business at Texas State University, is a co-author. Her co-authors are Sören Köcher and Sarah Köcher of Kiel University in Germany, Susan Myrden of the University of Maine’s Maine Business School, and Genevieve E. O’Connor of Fordham University’s Gabelli School of Business.

What engagement means here

The scale is called the Consumers’ Climate Change Engagement scale, or CCCE. Engagement in this sense has three parts. Cognitive engagement is how much a person thinks about climate change when making purchases. Emotional engagement is how much they feel about it. Behavioral engagement is how much they act on it in what they buy and how they consume.

The point of combining the three is that attitudes alone predict behavior poorly. A person can worry about the climate and still buy as before. The scale asks about resources invested, not just opinions held.

The study

The team ran five studies to build and test the scale. Scale development in marketing research usually starts by defining the concept, then generating candidate survey items, then trimming and testing them on fresh samples. The end result here is nine items, short enough to fit in a customer survey without wearing out respondents.

The authors describe the scale as parsimonious, meaning it captures the concept with few questions. They also call it validated, meaning it performed consistently across the studies.

What it means for marketers

The most direct use is measurement. A brand that wants to know whether customers weigh the climate when buying can ask nine questions and get a comparable score. That score can be tracked over time, compared across segments, or used to test whether a campaign changed anything.

The second use is targeting. Consumers who score high on the scale are the ones most likely to respond to climate-related product claims. Consumers who score low may need a different appeal, or none. Knowing the distribution within a customer base helps decide where to spend effort.

A third use is honesty checking. Many firms report survey results showing that customers care about sustainability. A validated scale that asks about cognitive, emotional, and behavioral investment gives a stricter test than a single attitude question.

What it means for policymakers

For public policy, the scale offers a way to evaluate programs. The authors tie the work to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. A standard measure makes it easier to compare interventions across countries and studies. Agencies that fund behavior-change campaigns can use the same nine items before and after a program.

The authors also frame the scale as a research tool. They expect it to support future work on how deeply consumers commit to climate-positive consumption and through which channels that commitment forms.

This summary is based on the paper’s abstract. The full article reports the data, methods, and detailed results.

What it means for managers

• Engagement has three parts: thinking, feeling, and acting. Measure all three rather than relying on stated attitudes alone.
• The nine-item CCCE scale is short enough for routine customer surveys. Use it to benchmark and track climate engagement over time.
• Scores can segment customers. Direct climate-related claims to those who engage, and test different appeals for those who do not.

Köcher, S., Alkire, L., Köcher, S., Myrden, S., & O'Connor, G. E. (2025). Consumers' climate change engagement: Conceptualization, scale development, and assessment. Journal of Business Research, 199, 115568. 10.1016/j.jbusres.2025.115568