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We acknowledge the support from the Internet Foundation Austria (IPA), particularly from Ernst Langmantel and the netidee.at funding program, which enabled us to collect the data and carry out the research described in this article. We are also grateful for the chance to cooperate with the editors of this special issue, Lee Fleming and Olav Sorenson. They have contributed to our work by providing us with valuable feedback and support. Finally, we received many useful comments from the anonymous reviewers for CMR that helped us move this article forward.

Like Cinderella, many repurposed products involve a biographical transformation, from a tattered past identity (e.g., an old airbag) to a product with a valuable but different new identity (e.g., a backpack made from an airbag). In this article, the authors argue that marketers should help customers infer such product stories by highlighting the products’ tattered past identities. Three field experiments and four controlled experiments show that making a product’s past identity salient boosts demand across a variety of repurposed products. This is because past identity salience induces narrative thoughts about these products’ biographies, which in turn allows customers to feel special. Results also suggest that this strategy of past identity salience needs to be particularly well-crafted for products with easily discernible past identities. These findings highlight a promising new facet of storytelling (i.e., stories that customers self-infer in response to minimal marketer input); create new opportunities for promoting products with a prior life; and deliver detailed guidance for the largely unexplored, growing market for upcycled and recycled products.

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