Dr Eunsoo Baek
Dr Eunsoo Baek recently published a paper titled ‘Diverse values of fashion rental service and contamination concern of consumers’ in the Journal of Business Research, a premier business journal established in 1973 that covers research on a variety of different business aspects. The paper is meaningful and timely as it sheds light on fashion rental services under the COVID-19 pandemic. As a form of collaborative consumption, fashion rental services have gained increasing attention in the fashion industry. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, fashion rental businesses have encountered a challenging situation in which they need to respond to consumers with heightened concerns around contamination. In response, this research work adopts a timely approach to understand how diverse consumption values of fashion rental services interplay with contamination concerns to predict attitudes and adoption intentions. The research findings not only contribute to the collaborative consumption literature but also provide actionable insights for relevant industries. We recommend that practitioners build strategic marketing communications to effectively reach consumers depending on their contamination concerns. Specifically, we suggest that the functional, emotional, and green values of fashion rental services should be emphasized to respond to consumers with heightened concerns around contamination. Nonetheless, our findings show that heightened concerns around contamination weakens the relationship between attitudes and adoption intentions, so practitioners should make additional effort to successfully transfer positive attitudes to behaviors.
With uncertainty about the future due to COVID-19 which could even last for a decade until there is the widespread availability of a vaccine (Wan & Johnson, 2020), heightened concerns around hygiene and worries about contamination may also persist for a relatively long period of time. In addition to perceptions, actual buying behaviors have changed, which may persist even post-pandemic (Sheth, 2020). Even though the future is uncertain, our findings provide guidance on the values that are more appropriate for communication purposes and take into consideration the concerns of target consumers around contamination.
