To Repair or Not to Repair: What Is the Motivation?

Abstract

The lights on the dishwasher panel blink and then go dark. No amount of pushing, prodding, or opening and closing the dishwasher door succeeds in restoring life to the now-defunct home appliance. The consumer faces a decision: should he try to extend the lifespan of the appliance by having it repaired or repairing it himself? Or should he dispose of the broken dishwasher and replace it with a new one? While a significant amount of marketing research has focused on how and why consumers choose to buy new products, relatively little research has focused on product usage and disposal generally and repair specifically. However, repair decisions have an important bearing on environmental sustainability; if more consumers choose to repair rather than replace degraded items, the demand for new items and the natural resources they contain could potentially be reduced, thereby improving the environmental sustainability of consumption. Thus, this research seeks to explore a crucial decision consumers frequently face: when a product no longer functions as it did when it was purchased, should it be repaired or replaced?Despite the increased consumer interest in repair and its potential benefits to society, little research has examined the propensity to repair products, its antecedents, and its outcomes. This research attempts to fill this gap by developing a measure of repair propensity and conducting a survey to assess important antecedents and outcomes of repair propensity among U.S. consumers. Two samples were used: a survey of the general population (from MTurk) and a survey of known repairers (from ifixit.com). Results from the comparison between the samples reveal more similarities than differences between consumers with average repair propensity and those with higher repair propensity. Specifically, the same antecedents and outcomes of repair propensity appear to be present whether consumers are relatively more or less likely to repair their products (see Figure 1).The results of this study indicate that all three categories of factors - market, product and consumer - have a significant influence on repair propensity. However, this study also indicates that within each category, there appears to be one or two variables that predominate. In terms of market factors, perceived inconvenience of repair seems to be the most influential. This finding would appear to indicate that marketers and policy makers interested in increasing repair behavior, either for sustainability or business purposes, should consider making repair parts and services more convenient to consumers. Making repair more convenient for consumers would also improve consumer well-being by reducing the psychic and time costs currently associated with repairs.For product factors, initial item cost appears to be the most influential for the two samples. However, for this factor, differences exist between the samples. The results suggest that economic factors, such as the cost of the item or the cost of replacement products, are more influential for consumers relatively lower in repair propensity. This finding suggests that reducing the cost of repairs relative to new products would be an effective way to promote repair behavior to those less likely to repair, and marketers could do so by making affordable replacement parts and repair manuals more available to consumers. Policy makers may also have an opportunity to facilitate repair by increasing the relative cost of new items by requiring manufacturers or consumers to internalize the cost of product disposal, as with California's electronic waste recycling fee (ca.gov 2014). Efforts like these to make repair more affordable could benefit consumers financially. Considering that many consumers use the percent rule (Scelfo 2009), consumers are, in many cases, spending more on replacement products than would be required for repair. By reducing the cost of repairs and making it more likely that the cost of repair would be less than 50 percent of the cost of a replacement product, consumers would be more likely to repair and thus have more money to use in pursuit of other goals. …