A Cinderella Story: How Past Identity Salience Boosts Demand for Repurposed Products

Abstract

Like Cinderella, many repurposed products involve a biographical transformation, from a tattered past identity (e.g., an old airbag) to a product with a valuable but different new identity (e.g., a backpack made from an airbag). In this article, the authors argue that marketers should help customers infer such product stories by highlighting the products’ tattered past identities. Three field experiments and four controlled experiments show that making a product’s past identity salient boosts demand across a variety of repurposed products. This is because past identity salience induces narrative thoughts about these products’ biographies, which in turn allows customers to feel special. Results also suggest that this strategy of past identity salience needs to be particularly well-crafted for products with easily discernible past identities. These findings highlight a promising new facet of storytelling (i.e., stories that customers self-infer in response to minimal marketer input); create new opportunities for promoting products with a prior life; and deliver detailed guidance for the largely unexplored, growing market for upcycled and recycled products.

Curatorial consumption: Objects’ circulation and transference in the vintage marketplace

“…First, with the increasing popularity of consuming old objects (McColl et al, 2013;Mintel, 2019), marketers can utilize their merchandise histories as a marketing tool, leveraging their products' and brands' past by sharing products' biographies. While the role of past associations in storytelling has been recognized in the context of retro brands (Brown et al, 2003), and upcycled products (Kamleitner et al, 2019), we suggest its potential with second-hand possessions. Researching and sharing (plausible) object histories, and accurate information about associated historical eras, helps to shape perceptions of authenticity (Grayson & Martinec, 2004).…”

Evaluating Barriers, Enablers and Opportunities for Closing the Loop through ‘Waste Upcycling’: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Facilitate community awareness and support [65] Networks for social innovation and encouraging more people to engage in upcycling [17,30,98] Use of material flow accounting to show the created value [51] Strengthening system-level waste solutions and social awareness [97,99] Advocate reuse over recycling [16] Provide design guide for upcycling with less time, efforts and money [14] Micro-enablers Shift in cultural perceptions [15,100] Optimise freely available material and bio-inspired procedures [14,56] Improve material provision [30] Train employees and suppliers and experiment development of new products [30] Promote reverse logistics [38] Take ownership, selling the uniqueness the story behind the product [14,56,99,101] Meso-enablers focus on local institutional factors and influences, as well as community factors that often drives the upcycled product manufacturing processes. Micro-enablers describe day-to-day practice and attributes or characteristics of individual enterprise and their practice environments that influence how products are manufactured.…”

“…Synthesising the key literature from 85 publications papers, Table 5 summarises emergent opportunities for waste upcycling categorises under social, environment and economic clusters. Leveraging sustainability-oriented innovation for waste valorisation [10] Stimulates entrepreneurship, supporting the culture of prosumerism [6,75] Socioeconomic regeneration by cocreating shared value [37,100] Ability to use biomimicry approaches [30] Facilitate economic diversification and can exploit Niche market opportunity [29] Collaboration among academic institutions, which could be set up through joint-funding schemes [16] Ability to create future goods and services that is consistent with sustainable development goals [9,104] Enables more sustainable consumer behaviour [16,96] Previous waste upcycling efforts have created opportunities for people to be socially responsible, inclusive and equitable, and use waste material to develop economically viable, environmentally sustainable and competitive businesses.…”

Human Perceptions of Recycled Textiles and Circular Fashion: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Other value-related mentions were value orientations [95], value for money [96], economic value added to companies [82,85], the fashion index value [97], and poor value appropriation for recycling [87]. Value can be added through a diverse range of strategies (occurrences: 11) and responses (occurrences: 9), including a practical recycling strategy [85], marketing communication strategy [98], strategy of past identity [99], or a collective strategy in terms of the implementation of life cycle assessment (LCA) [79]. Responses related mainly to marketing [99].…”