Indeed a ‛silver bullet’ – improving the measurement of ageing in consumer behaviour using the characteristic age approach

The aim of this paper is to elaborate on the status quo of measuring age in older consumer behaviour research and to identify new research avenues by introducing approaches from gerontology and demography. The study is based on a review of 211 papers on the behaviour of consumers at an advanced age. Our findings provide a comprehensive overview of chronological, biological, psychological, social, and multi-theoretical age measures. The results show that ability perspectives have become more prevalent in recent years but have not been able to break the dominance of chronological age. To foster theory development, we propose several actions to encourage a stronger interdisciplinary focus in consumer behaviour research on established, parsimonious, performance-based, and robust measures from gerontology and demography.