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Introduces a new guarantee type termed “combined guarantee”, which combines the wide scope of the full satisfaction guarantee with the specific performance standards of the attribute‐specific guarantee. Should the consumer be dissatisfied with any element of the service, the full satisfaction coverage of the combined guarantee applies. Specific performance standards are added to communicate minimum performance levels covered by the guarantee, which reduce customer uncertainty about the intended scope of the guarantee. Proposes that such combined guarantees would be superior to the pure designs, as they combine the wide scope of full satisfaction guarantees with the low uncertainty of attribute‐specific guarantees. Two experimental studies were conducted to examine consumers’ perceptions of the alternative guarantee designs. The findings show that the combined guarantee outperformed all other designs and, therefore, demonstrate that firms can design better guarantees than merely promising full satisfaction.

Studies reputation for service quality as a potential moderator of the relationship between a service guarantee and its impact on consumer perceptions of service quality, risk and purchase intent. A before‐after experimental design, set in the hotel industry, was employed to explore the impacts of a service guarantee for an outstanding versus a good service provider. Contrary to what had been implied in the past, the introduction of an explicit guarantee had no negative effect for the outstanding service provider in our study. In fact, the provision of a guarantee marginally improved expected quality, reduced perceived risk, and had no effect on purchase intent. However, for the good quality provider, the impacts were all positive and strong, and apart from the impact on perceived risk, the effects were significantly stronger than those for the outstanding quality provider. Our findings thus support the hypothesized moderating role of service quality.

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.

This paper uses a conceptual approach drawing upon and synthesizing the luxury goods and services marketing literature.

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.

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).

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.