Made to break? A taxonomy of business models on product lifetime extension

This paper contributes to the establishment of product lifetime extension (PLE) as a field of study through development of a framework of product lifetime extension business models (PLEBM), and offering of a taxonomy of PLEBM. The proposed taxonomy of PLEBM draws systematically on characteristics of 150 organizations which are identified in the scholarly and managerial literature as engaging in PLE. By considering the full spectrum of PLE practices systematically, we delineate these organizations on seven dimensions (i.e., key activities, key partners, channels, customer segments, customer relationships, offering, and revenue streaming) with 30 corresponding literature-based features. A clustering procedure, with key activities and key partners as input variables, revealed seven mutually exclusive PLEBMs: Relational product-as-a-service, Brick&digital product nurturers, Quality product designers, Secondhand vendors, Marketer-managed access systems, and P2P access brokers. Overall, product nature improvement through design is found less prevalent than product nurture strategies, such as maintenance (maintenance/advice/training/consulting), recovery (remanufacturing and repair), redistribution and access schemes. This study also presents a state-of-the-art overview on how organizations and consumers extend (pro-)actively product lifetimes. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.