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

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.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:VIENNA/oai:epub.wu-wien.ac.at:7211
Date January 2019
CreatorsKamleitner, Bernadette, ThĂĽrridl, Carina, Martin, Brett A. S.
PublisherAmerican Marketing Association
Source SetsWirtschaftsuniversität Wien
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeArticle, PeerReviewed
Formatapplication/pdf
RightsCreative Commons: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Relationhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0022242919872156, https://www.ama.org/, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022242919872156, http://epub.wu.ac.at/7211/

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