Luxury services
Abstract
Purpose
The market for luxury is growing rapidly. While there is a significant body of literature on luxury goods, academic research has largely ignored luxury services. The purpose of this article is to open luxury services as a new field of investigation by developing the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings to build the luxury services literature and show how luxury services differ from both luxury goods and from ordinary (i.e. non-luxury) services.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper uses a conceptual approach drawing upon and synthesizing the luxury goods and services marketing literature.
Findings
This article makes three contributions. First, it shows that services are largely missing from the luxury literature, just as the field of luxury is mostly missing from the service literature. Second, it contrasts the key characteristics of services and related consumer behaviors with luxury goods. The service characteristics examined are non-ownership, IHIP (i.e. intangibility, heterogeneity, inseparability, and perishability), the three additional Ps of services marketing (i.e. people, processes, and physical facilities) and the three-stage service consumption model. This article derives implications these characteristics have on luxury. For example, non-ownership increases the importance of psychological ownership, reduces the importance of conspicuous consumption and the risk of counterfeiting. Third, this article defines luxury services as extraordinary hedonic experiences that are exclusive whereby exclusivity can be monetary, social and hedonic in nature, and luxuriousness is jointly determined by objective service features and subjective customer perceptions. Together, these characteristics place a service on a continuum ranging from everyday luxury to elite luxury.
Practical implications
This article provides suggestions on how firms can enhance psychological ownership of luxury services, manage conspicuous consumption, and use more effectively luxury services' additional types of exclusivity (i.e. social and hedonic exclusivity).
Originality/value
This is the first paper to define luxury services and their characteristics, to apply and link frameworks from the service literature to luxury, and to derive consumer insights from these for research and practice.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the constructive feedback, suggestions and ideas provided by the two reviewers and the following academics and practitioners (in alphabetical order): Tiffany Baer (expert on emotional responses to luxury at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences & Laboratory for the Study of Emotion Elicitation and Expression, University of Geneva); Russell W. Belk (Professor; Kraft Foods Chair in Marketing at York University); Michael Frese (Professor of Management and Organization at the National University of Singapore); Doreen Kum (Associate Professor of Marketing, National University of Singapore), Siva Govindasamy (Vice President Corporate Affairs, Singapore Airlines) who helped to coordinate input provided by the various Singapore Airlines associates who work on its Suite Class product; Jeannette Ho (Vice President, Raffles Brand & Strategic Relationships, Accor Hotels Luxury Division); Veronique Tran (Professor of Organizational Behavior at ESCP Europe), Mariame Wade (e-retailing executive, Dior); Ian Wilson (who was during the conduct of this study Senior Vice President, Non-Gaming Operations at Marina Bay Sands, Singapore).The authors are listed in reverse alphabetical order. All authors contributed equally to this article.
Citation
Wirtz, J., Holmqvist, J. and Fritze, M.P. (2020), "Luxury services", Journal of Service Management, Vol. 31 No. 4, pp. 665-691. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOSM-11-2019-0342
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited