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Purpose There is a growing trend that hospitality brands are allowing employees to personalize their workplace display. Following this trend in practice, this paper aims to examine the influence of employees’ conspicuous consumption cues (ECCCs) on consumer responses toward service failures in luxury dining. Design/methodology/approach Two experiments were conducted. Study 1 adopted a 2 (ECCC: present vs absent) × 2 (employee physical attractiveness: control vs high) between-subject experiment to test the effect of ECCCs in interactional service failures. Study 2 tested the hypotheses in core service failures. Findings The results of Study 1 indicate that the presence of ECCCs lowers consumers’ negative behavioral intentions in interactional service failures when employees are highly attractive. When employees’ attractiveness is not distinctive, however, ECCCs lead to higher levels of negative behavioral intentions. Mediation test results demonstrate that perceived employee service competence drives this effect. Results of Study 2 show that the joint effect of ECCCs and physical attractiveness is attenuated when core service failures are not attributable to the service employee. Research limitations/implications Extending previous research, this study reveals the impact of employees’ physical characteristics on consumers’ post-failure responses. In addition, the effect of ECCCs on consumers’ post-failure responses was driven by the psychological process of perceived competence. Practical implications Findings of this research emphasize the importance for hospitality brands to practice tight control over employee esthetics. For hospitality brands that embrace individuality in the workplace, results of this research highlight the importance of service training in customer interactions. Originality/value This research examines an underexplored phenomenon in the hospitality service setting: employees’ display of conspicuous consumption cues and its impact on consumers’ responses to service failures.

Despite the enduring importance of green marketing literature, it has been argued that limited studies have been devoted to addressing green brand-related issues in the Chinese sports industry. To address this significant void in prior literature, this paper examines the influences of three antecedents (green perceived value, brand attachment, and self-image brand congruity) on green brand loyalty. Following the quantitative research, 532 participant’s data collected from a web-based survey conducted for three months in 2022. The PLS-SEM technique using SmartPLS 4 software has been used in conducting data analysis on 532 valid responses received. The research findings indicate direct and indirect significant effects of green perceived value on brand loyalty via brand attachment and self-image congruity. In addition, conspicuous consumption significantly moderates green self-image-brand attachment relationship. The results suggested that managers must create a strong emotional tie of brands and products with environmentally conscious users, highlighting the firm’s commitment to environmental responsibility and providing sustainable products and services.

Recently, a number of papers draw upon ideas from sexual selection and costly signaling theory to argue that conspicuous consumption has evolved as a sexually selected mating strategy. I outline what are considered to be the criteria for arguing that a trait is the outcome of sexual selection and I explore whether conspicuous consumption is sexual adaptation. Though I share the insight that evolutionary theory can contribute to our understanding of consumption behavior, I argue that existing evolutionary explanations of conspicuous consumption do not examine human evolved psychology and available evidence about past environments. I further argue that cultural evolution theory provides an alternative explanation of conspicuous consumption in modern environments. In particular, conspicuous consumption is understood as a pattern of behavior marked by specific social learning mechanisms. Such an approach reflects the analytical tools of cultural evolution theory and provides a classification of cognitive factors involved in consumption choices.

PurposeDriven by social comparison and self-congruity theories, this paper's aim was to investigate the associations with Korean millennials' usage of social media, self-image congruity and conspicuous online consumption. The mediating influence of self-image congruity and the moderating effect of self-esteem were also examined.Design/methodology/approachThese data were gathered through an online research portal from 302 Korean millennials. Structural equation modeling (SEM) analyses and moderated mediation analysis using Hayes PROCESS macro were applied to test proposed hypotheses.FindingsThe result of the structural equation analyses showed strong, positive associations between social media usage, self-image congruity and conspicuous online consumption, while self-image congruity also acted as a mediator between Korean millennials' usage of social media and conspicuous online consumption. Moreover, in moderated mediation analysis, the pathway between self-image congruity and conspicuous online consumption was stronger for millennials with higher self-esteem.Originality/valueMillennials' social media usage and conspicuous consumption are widely acknowledged in consumer research. However, little is known about how millennials' social media usage could influence their conspicuous online consumption through mediating and moderating mechanisms such as self-image congruity and self-esteem. This research extends previous studies by analyzing these mechanisms.

Conspicuous consumption is a behavior that is becoming prevalent in today's world. Although limited attention has been given to conspicuous consumption in a digital world, it is a behavior that everyone practices, in different degrees. This article sets out to reveal and examine the underlying psychological motivations of online conspicuous consumption. Semi-structured interviews are adopted as a qualitative technique. The interviews were conducted with fifteen Jordanian residents who have access to the internet and social media. The findings reveal that the four proposed psychological motivations (envy, materialism, narcissism, and social comparison) are of significant influence on users' online conspicuous consumption. This study introduces a comprehensive model of online conspicuous consumption that was not addressed earlier in the literature and provides a viable foundation for future research in this context. Furthermore, the results will help marketing managers to better understand and manage their strategies in reference to users' psychological motivations when posting online.

El consumo de bienes superfluos e innecesarios es una forma en que la élite busca destacarse y sentirse diferente al resto de la sociedad en la que vive. Tanto factores internos como externos son fundamentales para comprender por qué esta minoría puede influir en aquellos menos afortunados, incitándolos a imitar sus patrones de consumo. Este artículo pretende analizar, basándose en las teorías de Veblen y otros autores, cómo el consumo conspicuo ejerce una influencia presente y poderosa en la sociedad. La primera parte ofrece una definición del consumo conspicuo, seguida en la segunda parte por estudios contemporáneos sobre los hábitos de gasto de las personas. Finalmente, la última sección analiza cómo la pandemia ha aumentado el gasto improductivo de las élites.

Consumer goods and services have psychological value that can equal or exceed their functional value. A burgeoning literature demonstrates that one source of value emerges from the capacity for products to serve as a psychological salve that reduces various forms of distress across numerous domains. This review systematically organizes and integrates the literature on the use of consumer behavior as a means to regulate self-discrepancies, or the incongruities between how one currently perceives oneself and how one desires to view oneself (Higgins, 1987). We introduce a Compensatory Consumer Behavior Model to explain the psychological consequences of self-discrepancies on consumer behavior. This model delineates five distinct strategies by which consumers cope with self-discrepancies: direct resolution, symbolic self-completion, dissociation, escapism, and fluid compensation. Finally, the authors raise critical questions to guide future research endeavors. Overall, the present review provides both a primer on compensatory consumer behavior and sets an agenda for future research.

PurposeThe 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/approachThis paper uses a conceptual approach drawing upon and synthesizing the luxury goods and services marketing literature.FindingsThis 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 implicationsThis 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/valueThis 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.

•A comprehensive theoretical framework detailing conspicuous consumption behavior.•It identifies three antecedents and two consequences along with a few moderators.•The framework is meta-analytically tested using 97 effect sizes from 59 studies. This paper documents a comprehensive theoretical framework that has been developed to understand conspicuous consumption behavior. The proposed framework identifies three antecedents and two consequences of conspicuous consumption. We tested hypotheses concerning this framework using a meta-analytic approach. We also meta-analytically tested the effect of contextual, methodological, and individual-level moderators on the relationship between conspicuous consumption and its consequences. Additionally, we examined the mediating role of conspicuous consumption behavior in the relationship between its antecedents and consequences using meta-analytic structural equation modeling. After an extensive literature search based on multiple selection criteria, we use 59 independent research studies and 97 unique effect sizes to test hypotheses. The findings theoretically contribute to the stock of knowledge on conspicuous consumption and provide new insights for practitioners. [Display omitted]

A core claim of sociological theory is that modern institutions fall short of their meritocratic ideals, whereby rewards should be allocated based on achievement-related criteria. Instead, high-status actors often experience a \"status advantage\": they are rewarded disproportionately to the quality of their performance. We develop and test a theory of status advantage in meritocratic settings. The most influential model in past research derives status advantage from decision-makers' tendency to infer quality from status when quality is uncertain. The theory developed here integrates and extends this and other theories to explain the emergence of status advantage in the many meritocratic contexts where the decision-maker's personal, first-order sense of quality is less important to the decision. We argue that in such contexts, decision-makers must often coordinate with others to make the \"best\" decision, and thus they focus on the \"third-order inference\" problem of discerning who or what \"most people\" think is higher quality, as encoded in status beliefs. Three experiments demonstrate that under such conditions, status advantages can emerge even though (1) status information does not resolve uncertainty about quality; (2) the status belief is illegitimate; and (3) no party to the decision personally prefers the higher-status option. The theory implies that status hierarchies are resilient in the face of significant dissent but may be subject to public challenge.