Circular Fashion Marketing and Consumer Participation in Resale, Repair and Recycling: The Mediating Role of Perceived Consumer Effectiveness

Abstract

This shift from a linear "fashion economy" to a circular economy depends on having active participation from consumers to prolong the life cycle of clothes, for example by reselling, repairing and recycling. The purpose of the present study is to understand the effect of CFM on Consumer participation in Resale, Repair and Recycle with special reference to mediating role of Perceived Consumer Effectiveness. The research is quantitative in nature and data was collected from 384 consumers through a structured questionnaire on 5 Likert Point scale. The underlying dimensions of the constructions of the study were determined and validated by using Exploratory Factor Analysis. This revealed 5 different dimensions: Circular Fashion Marketing, Perceived Consumer Effectiveness, Resale Participation, Repair Participation and Recycling Participation. The extracted factors accounted for 76.633% of total variance, with KMO as 0.912, which indicates the suitability of the data for factor analysis. The simple linear regression results showed that the influence of Circular Fashion Marketing on Consumer Participation was significant with β value of 0.724 (p<0.001) with R² value of 0.524 or 52.4%. Additionally, the mediation analysis revealed that the relationship between Circular Fashion Marketing and Consumer Participation was also mediated by Perceived Consumer Effectiveness with a significant indirect effect of 0.335 and a 95% bootstrap confidence interval of 0.270–0.408. The direct effect was still significant after adding the mediator, and thus partial mediation has been proven. The study finds that circular fashion marketing could stimulate a greater participation of consumers in the resale and the repair/recycle of fashion-items and to increase consumer deceit that their own behaviour can have an impact and be part of environmental sustainability. The results give valuable implications to fashion marketers, circular business modellers and policy makers towards sustainable involvement of consumers.