Collaborative Consumption:A Drive Towards Ephemeralization

Collaborative Consumption (CC) is an impending economic model that has the potential to bring about a paradigm shift in the way people produce and consume resources. CC is the concept of sharing resources for monetary or non-monetary benefit with strangers, with the aid of technology. The synergistic combination of experience economy, accelerating change and the idea of ephemeralization led to ubiquity of sharing platforms that is drastically changing peoples' lifestyle in the 21st century. Though the concept of CC is profoundly successful in many countries, the notion of sharing with strangers is relatively new to Indian consumers. Knowing the benefits of CC like optimum resource utilization, sustainability, and employment creation, many platforms are emerging in India at an exponential rate. Yet, the rate of adoption of this idea is found to be relatively low among people. In order to increase the penetration rate of CC it is imperative to understand the factors that drive/inhibit the people towards/from CC participation. This study reports the findings of a survey conducted over a period of two months during April-May 2018, on a sample of 120 Indian millennials to understand their awareness, attitude, motivation, and challenges in sharing resources and accessing the available platforms. Millennials are chosen for the study since they are tech-savvy people with good spending power, and are major users of CC platforms. Using exploratory factor analysis and Kano model, the drivers of consumer participation in CC are mapped, and the hidden driver for CC participation is found to be the economic factor. It is also found that though millennials have good attitude towards sharing resources and are highly motivated, their awareness about existing platforms is very low and many platforms operate in urban regions, making it out-of reach for rural population to collaborate. Thus, the study identified the need to motivate people to embrace CC practices, as CC can provide one-step solution to many problems like inequality, hyper-consumption, resource mismanagement and poor standard of living.