Hold on, do I really need this? The effect of short reflections on young consumers' purchase desire and purchase likelihood

Fast fashion, a main contributor to pollution worldwide, plays an increasingly important role in the fashion industry. Young fashion consumers are a demographic with great spending power in the fast fashion market and their purchases are often based on impulse. Hence, we wanted to explore if short interventions interrupting the impulse can decrease their purchase desire and purchase likelihood. Previous studies in the US have shown that short reflections can decrease purchase desire in consumers and a study with students from South Korea showed that short postponement alone in comparison to other interventions has no significant influence on the buying process. We wanted to follow up on these findings. Therefore, we conducted an experimental vignette study using Qualtrics and collected the data with Prolific. First, participants’ purchase desire was primed with a spontaneous shopping scenario. Second, participants were randomly allocated to one of three short reflection exercises or to a control condition with no exercise in a between-subject-design. Third, participants purchase desire and purchase likelihood was measured. Preliminary results (with very strict exclusion criteria) revealed that reflections based on a deliberation exercise (thinking about reasons of why not to buy a clothing piece) were successful in reducing fashion purchase desire and purchase likelihood in a shopping scenario. No differences were found when asked to reflect on environmental impacts or not. Moreover, reflections based on desire depletion (thinking about the happiest memory with one's favourite piece of clothing) had no effect. With our study we wanted to extend the research on short reflections used as interventions and we specifically aimed to test the effectiveness of different short reflection strategies. Results which are informative for the further development of behavioural interventions targeting fashion consumption.