Search results

Luxury consumption has evolved, and two important reasons behind the change include globalization and the COVID-19 crisis. These factors have led to the rise of new luxury consumption, which is different from traditional luxury consumption. This study examines how consumers’ identities shape their intentions to consume traditional luxury and new luxury brands.

The theoretical underpinnings of the schema congruity theory and heuristic systematic framework were applied to understand the role of identities in determining consumers’ regulatory focus, price luxuriousness inference and preference for traditional and new luxury brands.

Findings suggest that the global identity of consumers shapes their promotion focus and price luxuriousness inferences. However, their local identities induce a prevention goal. Consumers with such a goal are unlikely to make price luxuriousness inferences. Further, these inferences lead to the choice of traditional luxury over new luxury brands. The results also establish the moderating effects of consumer flexibility.

The extant literature is inconclusive on the role of globalization in luxury consumption and ignores new luxury brands. The current study shows the impact of identities and regulatory focus on traditional and new luxury consumption. The findings also indicate consumers’ regulatory focus and price luxuriousness inference as the reasons behind the influence. The paper also implies that consumers open to renting, sharing or buying second-hand goods will prefer new luxury over traditional luxury brands.

Luxury brands struggle to communicate their sustainability commitments to consumers due to the perceived incongruence between “luxury” and “sustainability”. This study aims to provide luxury brands with insights on how to engage consumers with different social value orientations (SVOs) to make sustainable luxury purchases in a compatible manner. It investigates the relationships between personal values (symbolism/universalism), SVOs (pro-self/prosocial orientation) and behavioral intentions toward sustainable luxury brands. It further explores whether these relationships may differ when consumers view themselves as individuals (salient personal identity is activated) versus group members (salient social identity is activated).

Study 1 (N = 419) used an online experiment in which participants were randomly assigned to either salient personal or social identity conditions to test the proposed model. Study 2 (N = 438) used a fictional brand to further validate the findings. Hypotheses were tested using covariance-based structural equation modeling (CB-SEM) and multi-group SEM.

Results indicate that prosocial orientation significantly increases consumers’ behavioral intentions toward sustainable luxury brands. Interestingly, pro-self-orientation can also drive intentions to support sustainable luxury brands when consumers’ personal identity is salient. Salient social identity can further strengthen the relationship between prosocial orientation and sustainable luxury behavioral intentions.

This study presents a novel, inclusive definition of sustainable luxury brands and adds theoretical rigor to the SVO framework by revealing the moderating role of salient identities, contributing to the body of knowledge in luxury brand research.

The authors investigated the factors influencing consumer evaluations of advertisements for ethical luxury products that incorporate animal rights and protection concerns. The authors empirically examined how ethical messages influence advertisement persuasiveness through ethical consumer guilt and positively impact consumer evaluations of ethical luxury products. Furthermore, the authors explored the moderating role of consumers’ independent versus interdependent self-construals.

The authors conducted four experimental studies on the interplay among ethicality, luxury brand positioning and self-construal. Moderated mediation analyses revealed that moral emotions were responsible for the effect of ethical luxury advertisements that address animal welfare on brand attitude.

Advertisement messages signaling a luxury brand’s ethical efforts increase empathy through ethical consumer guilt, thereby generating favorable attitudes toward luxury products. However, this effect is limited to consumers with independent self-construal in South Korea and the United States of America.

The authors offer novel insights into the roles of ethical consumer guilt and empathy in the positive effects of ethical messages from luxury brands. Furthermore, the authors identified brand type and self-construal as boundary conditions for the effects observed across different consumer groups and markets.

Extant research captures the signaling and attitudinal effects of luxury brand prominence strategy; however, little is known about the underlying mechanisms that drive this effect. This study aims to uncover brand authenticity and brand coolness as parallel mediators driving the effects of brand prominence on luxury purchase intentions and explores the moderating role of consumers’ self-brand connection.

The research consisted of three experiments. Study 1 (n = 121) explored the direct effects of brand prominence among Chinese consumers. Using a sample of Turkish consumers (n = 115), Study 2, measured the mediation effects of brand authenticity and brand coolness. Study 3 (n = 211) examined how self-brand connection moderated the mediation effects among British customers.

A luxury brand prominence strategy leads to negative perceptions of coolness and authenticity and, in turn, reduces purchase intentions. The negative effect of brand prominence is even more pronounced among consumers with high self-brand connection.

The study elaborates on how brand prominence informs consumers’ perceptions of authenticity and coolness. In examining the role of self-brand connection, the study reveals a theoretically and managerially relevant boundary condition of this focal effect.

The research highlights how luxury brands can use differing brand prominence strategies. This research informs brand managers on how to enhance brand authenticity and coolness while managing self-brand connection.

The study extends the luxury branding literature by explaining the brand prominence effect through the parallel mediators of brand authenticity and brand coolness. In contrast to extant research, the findings show that the negative effect of brand prominence is particularly strong among consumers with high self-brand connection.

Nowadays all luxury brands have their own websites, using them either as a communication and/or distribution tool. However, luxury consumers might still have different perceptions regarding these websites, as it can be seen as a loss of prestige or selectivity. This study aims to have a deeper understanding of luxury consumers’ perceptions of luxury brand websites by identifying a typology and defining the individual characteristics of the groups identified.

The research uses the opposition of personal and interpersonal luxury as theoretical framework and the semiotic square based on this semantic opposition. A qualitative analysis based on 42 semi-structured interviews has been conducted. The interviews have been analyzed and subjected to interpretive content analysis.

The analysis of the verbatims shows that the consumers’ motivations toward luxury consumption (luxury for self or personal, luxury for others or interpersonal, negation of luxury for self and negation of luxury for others) can explain consumer differences in terms of attitudes toward luxury brand websites. The four classes are characterized according to their positive and negative perceptions of e-commerce and interaction tools used in luxury brands websites and also their expectations.

This study defines guidelines for managers to develop luxury brand websites that correspond to their target.

The originality of this study lies in the use of the semiotic square to refine the analysis of luxury consumers’ attitudes and to make more precise contributions. It also relies on using the theory of personal and interpersonal luxury to understand consumers’ expectations toward luxury brands websites.

Do luxury consumers negatively evaluate digital interactions (website and social media) by international luxury brands? The topic has received much debate. The authors argue that luxury brand personality (modern vs. traditional), which encompasses a more stable form of brand identity in global markets, affects evaluations of digital interactions. They further investigate the role of self-brand connection in this process.

Three experiments on Prolific use a European sample and manipulate a single factor between subjects (modernity: less vs. more; traditionality: less vs. more) of French luxury brands and measure evaluations as the dependent variable. Two studies assesses self-brand connection (continuous) as a moderator (studies 2a, 2b). Study 2b rules out some alternative explanations, with culture (independent vs. collectivist) as an independent variable. A fourth study, using a North American sample on CloudResearch, assesses the effect of personality manipulation (more modernity vs. more traditionality) on consumer evaluations of an Italian brand, and assesses ubiquity perceptions as a mediator.

Consumers evaluate digital interactions of international luxury brands less favorably when luxury brand personality exhibits more (vs. less) modernity or less (vs. more) traditionality. Perceptions of ubiquity mediate these relationships. When self-brand connection is high, this effect is attenuated.

The research sheds light on the debate on whether luxury brands should create digital interactions in international markets, given that these global brands operate in multiple channels. Findings show that luxury brands can develop strategies based on aspects of their brand identity, a less malleable feature of brand identity within global markets. Additionally, the research contributes to the conversation about a global luxury market. In short, the findings offer evidence in favor of brand identity (personality) influencing the digital channel strategy a brand should undertake in international markets, first, followed by consumer needs.

This study examined the differential effects of printed advertisements with luxury and nonluxury brands on consumer brand attitude persuasion using a qualitative experimental approach.

The authors adopted a qualitative experimental approach and the authors conducted two experiments over six months. In the first experiment, participants were asked to view five print advertisements related to five different luxury brands. In the second experiment, the same participants were asked to view another five print advertisements on non-luxury brands. The qualitative thematic differences for each brand were analyzed using NVivo software, employing the theoretical assumptions of Petty and Cacioppo's (1981) elaboration likelihood model (ELM).

In experiments 1 and 2, it was identified that brand experience, personalized brand experience, product quality, product quantity, personal image-conscious, nonpersonal image-conscious, affordability and unaffordability as the main thematic findings leading to consumer attitude persuasion.

The two main contributions are as follows: theoretically, applying a social psychology theory to the advertising industry offers an understanding of the social cognition stages of a human mindset. As a practical implication, this study's findings guide advertising agencies, marketers and salespeople regarding how to design effective print advertisements in a way that persuades consumer attitudes.

Through the theoretical assumptions of Petty and Cacioppo's (1981) ELM, this paper can be considered one of the first studies to combine social psychology and advertising to investigate the differential effects on consumer brand attitude persuasion for luxury and nonluxury brands.

Marketing scholars have begun to look at negative emotions that young consumers could develop toward brands, such as brand hate. Brand hate has experienced exponential growth during the past decades in the cosmetic industry. In this frame, the purpose of this paper is to identify the weight of each of the five key drivers of brand hate and to analyze if these weights are the same (or not) for drugstore and luxury make-up brands regarding.

To carry on this paper, brand haters in the make-up industry were contacted with the help of cosmetic influencers. Participants of the online questionnaire (N = 162) were existing young makeup consumers. They were divided into drugstore and luxury makeup brand haters by classifying their identified hated brands into either group.

The authors’ results showed, first, that experiential, identity, moral, deficit-value and advertising avoidance all had a positive effect on brand hate, being identity avoidance the strongest one. Second, drugstore and luxury makeup brand haters do not differ, as far as no differences were identified in the strength of each avoidance type on brand hate.

There is a gap in the literature related to the absence of work investigating brand hate in the make-up industry; moreover, studies measure whether brand hate drivers are the same (or not) for luxury brands and drugstore brands that compete in the same arena. In this framework, this research will provide a specific industry context involving young consumer opinions. Research into consumer–brand relationships has been largely focused on the positive forms, while the negative forms are still a relatively newer area of academic interest. Even more, brand hate has been investigated from a multidimensional approach linking proposals from different authors has been tested.

With the growing market for luxury fashion rental, we aim to examine how renting luxury fashion is related to consumers' construction of the material self, based on material self-framework. We propose that consumers adopt luxury fashion rentals to construct and manage the personal and social aspects of the material self and that their belief in brand essence facilitates the mechanism.

A total of 296 responses of US female participants collected from Cloudresearch were analyzed to test the relationships between constructs in the proposed model.

The results, using structural equation modeling analysis, supported the expected relationships. Specifically, whereas the social material self directly increased adoption intention, the personal material self indirectly increased such intention via the belief that rented luxury items preserve brand essence.

Our findings advance the literature by showing how the self is constructed and managed in collaborative luxury fashion consumption, from self-identity perspective. The current research reveals the important roles of two aspects of material self that respectively contribute to consumers' adoption of luxury fashion rentals.

This study empirically tests the material self theory in the context of luxury fashion rental and demonstrates the processes of how consumers regard a luxury fashion rental as a tool to construct their identity. This study not only validates the two-structure model of material self (social and personal), but also incorporate the role of brand essence in revealing how the two facets of material self differently facilitate luxury fashion rental adoption.

The study explores different types of anti-luxurians on social media (SM), the characteristics of luxury brands, tendencies to disengage and the opposition to them to propose future directions for luxury marketing in the post-pandemic world.

A qualitative approach was employed, wherein 979 posts from SM platforms were analyzed with the text analytics software package KH Coder through word-frequency analysis and an inductive technique.

The analysis identified the presence of eight types of online anti-luxurians: true luxurians, nature-experienced lovers, life simplifiers, anti-haulers, highly expected consumers, natural environment protectors, antidiscrimination consumers and historic-politic antagonists. Their degree of disengagement and opposition were discussed and graphically mapped.

This is the first study to discover various types of anti-luxurians on SM platforms and graphically map their level of disengagement and opposition toward luxury brands. This study fills an existing critical gap in the luxury marketing literature.