A Study on the Effect of Emotional and Cognitive Motives on the Sustainable Clothing Consumption Behavior

Clothing production, consumption and waste have increased due to many reasons such as global population growth in recent years, increased living standards, being influenced by fashion, easier access to products and the intensity of ads. This situation has led to a number of problems such as exhaustion of resources, concerns about environmental issues, excessive and unnecessary consumption. One of the measures to be taken against emerging problems is the development of sustainable clothing consumption behavior. Sustainable clothing consumption is a behavior including many stages such as the purchase, storage, use, preservation and disposal of clothing products. There are lots of alternatives such as purchasing organic clothes, the choice of clothes that are washed in lower temperatures, dry in shorter time and require less iron, the resale or donation of used clothes to a second retail store within the cycle of clothing consumption to improve the sustainability of clothes. Therefore, today s clothing industry has gone beyond meeting basic physiological and psychological needs and particularly upswing in the fashion has altered the social and cultural significance of clothing on a large scale. When people buy a product, they are often influenced by emotional motives, but cognitive motives are also important. In this context, this research aims to investigate the effect of consumer emotional and cognitive motives on sustainable clothing consumption behavior. 366 questionnaires were obtained by sampling method easily. As a result of explanatory factor analysis, Sustainable Clothing Consumption Behavior has been divided into four factors as throwing, donating, reusing clothes and buying responsible clothing. As a result of the regression analysis, it has been determined that emotional motives have an effecton the behavior of throwing clothes, donation, reusing, and buying responsible clothing; and cognitive motives have an effect on clothing donation and responsible clothing purchasing behavior. With this research, it was also tested whether sustainable clothing consumption behavior showed a meaningful difference by demographic characteristics. According to the analysis results, it was concluded that sustainable clothing consumption behavior differed according to gender, marital status, education and occupation and did not differ according to age and income status.