Do You Want to Change Your Mind? A Study on the Effect of Trialability on CBM Purchase Intention

Sammanfattning

While sustainability is becoming more and more important, industries like the fashion industry are still contributing significantly to the ongoing climate crisis. In light of this, the concept of circular economy has been receiving increasing worldwide attention as a solution to overcome the current harmful production and consumption model. Despite this, consumer adoption of circular business models (CBMs) is low. By bridging CBM research with consumer research and innovation theories, this thesis, situated within the context of a children's clothing Product-Service-System (PSS), aims to study whether trialability can be an effective mean to improve purchase intention. This is done through an experiment. In addition, the study investigates knowledge as an additional independent variable and perceived risk as a potential mediator. Empirical data was collected by distributing an online survey to Swedish and German parents (n = 301). The results show that trialability has neither a significant effect on perceived risk nor on purchase intention, while knowledge has a negative relationship with perceived risk but is not related to purchase intention. In addition, the study confirms the role of perceived risk as a mediator. Furthermore, the study revealed both low perceived risk and purchase intention for the studied CBM. Hence, it can be concluded that trialability is not a viable option to improve purchase intention and that further research on other practices that might increase consumer acceptance of CBMs is encouraged.