A research to analyze consumers' knowledge and conscious level about planned obsolescence

Nowadays strategy of planned obsolescence, that has been existing for almost a hundred years, has two essential drivers. These are businesses, which have to make decisions in the conditions of growthist economy and global competition, and consumers, who often have "new" expectations in consumption culture. Planned obsolescence, which actualizes due to interaction between those two-decision makers, causes excessive resource consumption and environmental pollution. Today, this has seen that a global awareness about the problems that are caused by overconsumption. There has been a change in tendency from consumption based on abundance and wastage to sensitive consumption that considers the well-being of all humankind. The purpose of this thesis is to specify consumers' level of knowledge and consciousness towards different types of planned obsolescence strategies that are implemented by businesses and to analyze relations between this and consumer behavior that is exhibited and to further consider what their tendency of conscious consumption is. In the direction of the research purpose, face-to-face in-depth interviews were conducted with 28 participants that were selected through the convenience sampling method with different ages, gender, education, occupations and income levels. In the interviews, the semi-structured interview form was used. As a result of acquired findings, qualitative research questions that were created by the research problem have been answered. These answers revealed a relation between participants' level of knowledge, consciousness, and their attitude towards product longevity. Furthermore, it has revealed that participants' dimensions of conscious consumerism shows a parallelism with participants' level of consciousness towards planned obsolescence. Keywords: Consumer Behaviour, Consumption Culture, Consumer Conscious, Product Obsolescence, Planned Obsolescence