BUS602: Marketing Management

In addition to meeting the basic human need for protection against weather variations, clothing functions as a means of personal communication by which individuals express themselves through their clothing choices. Because this practice has persisted over recorded human history, it might be regarded as an acquired human need. Nonetheless, the clothing industry of today has moved well beyond merely satisfying basic physiological and psychological needs, and the rise of fast fashion, especially, has greatly altered clothing's societal and cultural significance. In particular, fast fashion has drastically shortened the clothing life cycle, with new styles swiftly superseding the old. Not only do many fast fashion retailers (e.g., H&M or Forever 21) introduce new merchandise on an almost weekly basis and deliberately manipulate the supply to create "must have" items targeted primarily at young consumers, but fast fashion products also tend to have a short lifespan. This brevity is not necessarily a result of the clothing's intrinsic quality but rather may stem from a reduction in the products' symbolic value (e.g., being outdated by newer trends). Overall, therefore, the fast fashion industry is characterized by short-term use, symbolic obsolescence, and increasing waste generation, meaning that its rise has had detrimental consequences for the environment. In fact, the clothing industry is currently one of the world's most polluting industries, heavily impacting the environment through its immense use of water and chemicals during production (e.g., for growing cotton or dying textiles), as well as ecosystem pollution, and textile waste generation. However, even though much environmental degradation can be attributed to the clothing industry, an equal part of the responsibility is borne by consumers, who, rather than being mindless market actors with no control over clothing's environmental impact, are instrumental in determining the number, frequency, and type of clothing items purchased, how these items are used and maintained, and the means of disposal once items are worn out or no longer wanted. All these consumer-related aspects have implications for clothing's final impact on the environment.

The purpose of the present study, therefore, is to assess consumer behavior as it relates to each of these aspects - with particular attention to current clothing consumption patterns through the purchase, use and maintenance, and disposal phases - as well as this behavior's implications for environmental sustainability. We do so using a consumer segmentation analysis that not only addresses consumer heterogeneity but, instead of characterizing the segments demographically as is common in previous research, differentiates them by purchase behavior. Such segmentation contributes to a better understanding of clothing consumption, one that can inform the development of targeted behavior change interventions. Our analysis also contrasts with previous empirical work in environmentally friendly and unfriendly clothing consumption in that rather than using small-scale or one-country samples to focus on one of the three consumption phases, it employs large diverse samples from four countries (Germany, Poland, Sweden, and the U.S.) to trace behavior patterns across all three phrases. It thus makes a unique contribution to this literature stream in both scope and analytical approach. Before reporting our results, however, we present an overview of the primary environmental concerns related to the clothing life cycle and then describe our sample and methodology.