Online Second-Hand Shopping. Threat or Opportunity for Branded Products?

Master's Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject Communications - Public Relations, Advertising, Marketing, Social Media, grade: 1,7, University of Münster, language: English, abstract: The internet has provided fertile ground for turning the traditional niche activity of second-hand shopping into a mass phenomenon. Various successful consumer-to-consumer-platforms such as eBay.de facilitate the exchange of second-hand goods for both resellers and buyers, with branded products being especially popu-lar. This development has fostered concerns from brand manufacturers. They fear that second-hand offerings pose a threat to brand perceptions. However, this assumption has yet not been verified empirically and constitutes a research gap in the marketing literature. The research aim of this thesis is thus to investigate whether the degree of availability of second-hand products affects consumer brand perceptions while taking into account the possible moderator effects of product type and price. Specifically, the effects on brand image, perceived quality, and perceived prestige are examined.Our conceptual framework is based on a combination of theoretical findings relating to second-hand products, brand perceptions and limited product availability. Moreover, it is supplemented through insights from related fields such as price promotions and counterfeits. After having pre-tested the stimuli for product type and price, a final quantitative online survey was carried out that yielded a total of 561 usable responses. Due to the study s experimental design and existence of multiple dependent variables, multivariate and univariate analysis of variance were employed to analyze the data. Our findings suggest that....