Investigating Consumer Values of Secondhand Fashion Consumption in the Mass Market vs. Luxury Market: A Text-Mining Approach

The purpose of this research is to investigate consumer values of secondhand fashion (SHF) consumption from online platforms in both the mass market and luxury market. The luxury SHF business is closely related to the business of SHF mass market. A cross-market value analysis would provide better insights to understand consumers’ motivations to purchase secondhand fashion products. Three mass-market SHF companies and three luxury SHF companies were selected as sample companies based on their revenues in the U.S. market. Consumers’ comments and reviews from a third-party business review site, trustpilot.com, were collected using the web-scraping technique. Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) analysis, as part of a machine learning algorithm, was applied to detect the most co-occurring word combinations and underlying values discussed in the reviews. The findings identified major consumer-perceived ‘source of values’, i.e., ‘possession/ownership transfer’, and ‘interaction between consumer to business platform’, which might negatively impact the performance of the business of SHF mass market compared to the luxury SHF business. The ’possession/ownership transfer’ source-related values are the most ignored value in the SHF mass market. By adopting the product-oriented value strategy practiced in the luxury market, SHF mass market might improve the consumer perception of product-related value areas.