To study newness and consumer practices related to newness,
we focused on clothing consumption. New clothes provide
an illustrious context for two reasons. First, clothes are
among the most commonly desired, purchased, and used
consumer goods. Second, their status as “innovation” is
ambiguous. Unlike technological products that dominate
the literature on new products, the newness of clothes is
related more to their symbolic than technical aspects.
We employed a multistage, multimethod data collection
procedure that involved projective techniques and in-depth
interviews. Informants were selected through purposeful/
purposive sampling. To ensure that the sample consisted of
equal numbers of male and female participants with variations
in age, education level, and occupation, we administered a
brief background questionnaire. In total, 24 informants participated
to the study (for informant profile, see Table 1).
At the first stage of data collection, collages and metaphoric
portraits were used. The goal was to encourage the respondents
to go beyond rational and cognitive responses and express their
emotions and desires (Branthwaite and Lunn, 1985). We
wanted to attain more personal, idiosyncratic responses and
obtain data that is rich and deep in content (Levy 1995). First,
the informants were instructed to collect images of what came
to their mind when they think of “old” and “new.” The informants
were then inquired about the images they chose to
include and were probed to explain them. Second, they were
asked to associate new and old with a color, taste, sound,
texture, and emotion. Finally, semistructured in-depth interviews
were conducted. We inquired about the practices informants
engaged in while shopping for clothing and using their
new and old clothes. The interviews lasted 2 to 3 hours and
were tape recorded and transcribed verbatim, totaling 271
pages of text. All interviews were conducted in Turkish and
have been translated into English by the authors.
Our analysis sought to identify conceptual categories and
themes through open and axial coding (Strauss and Corbin
1998). We independently read both sets of interview transcripts
several times to gain a perspective of contexts for consumers’
experiences and their strategies to manage newness.
Each of us identified emergent themes first on our own; we