Too good to go? Consumers’ replacement behaviour and potential strategies for stimulating product retention

Many products are disposed of before they have reached the end of their functional life. New technological developments and trends in fashion seem to accelerate consumers’ replacement of products. From an environmental perspective, such early replacement is undesirable. In this paper, we emphasize that product replacement is not only based on rational decision making. Emotional, functional, social, epistemic and conditional values can influence the value trade-offs that consumers make during the decision to either retain an owned product or replace it with a new one. Several strategies are discussed that can increase the owned product's values and stimulate retention via product attachment, sustaining aesthetic value, stimulating product care and maintenance, and enabling upgradeability.