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Although a large body of research has investigated how consumers use goods to signal their status, little is known about how brands manage status. The very few studies that have examined this topic are grounded in the traditional conception of status and focus on the possession and display of status signals. The authors offer an alternative understanding of status management by investigating the role of interactions in the service encounter. Drawing from extensive ethnographic work in luxury stores, they investigate how brands (re)configure the status games that surface in the service encounter. They show that through the material and social cues of the servicescape, brands shape consumers' class subjectivities—that is, they make consumers behave as class subjects who have a specific understanding of their position in the social hierarchy. Thus, managing status requires the active creation and management of consumers as class subjects. There is a shift from managing branded goods that signal status to managing customer experiences that make consumers enact status positions. This research helps identify new ways to manage status brands, especially luxury brands.

This research distinguishes between the goal of maintaining status and advancing status and investigates how consumers’ political ideology triggers sensitivity to a status-maintenance (vs. status-advancement) goal, subsequently altering luxury consumption. Because conservative political ideology increases the preference for social stability, the authors propose that conservatives (vs. liberals) are more sensitive to status maintenance (but not status advancement) and thus exhibit a greater desire for luxury goods when the status-maintenance goal is activated. Six studies assessing status maintenance using sociodemographic characteristics (Studies 1, 2, and 3a) and controlled manipulations, including ad framing (Study 3b) and semantic priming (Studies 4 and 5), provide support for this proposition. The studies show that the effect is specific to status maintenance and does not occur (1) in the absence of a status goal or (2) when the status-advancement goal (a focus on increasing status) is activated. Overall, the findings reveal that conservatives’ desire for luxury goods stems from the goal of maintaining status and offer insights into how luxury brands can effectively tailor their communications to audiences with a conservative ideology.

The current work examines how consumers respond to luxury products designed with significant utilization of technology. It delineates two inherent values of luxury products—emotional and functional—and argues that utilizing technology in the luxury product design process negatively impacts the emotional value but enhances the associated functional value. Such paradoxical impact of AI-led design on emotional and functional values leads to a differential effect on consumer response patterns. For luxury products that particularly draw on their superior emotional value (e.g., luxury fashion brands), using AI as a design source significantly reduces the perceived brand essence, leading to negative consumer response. However, when a luxury brand draws its essence from the associated functional value (in addition to the emotional value), either because of the product characteristics (e.g., luxury automobiles) or when such value is made externally salient (e.g., through marketing message appeals), the negative response is attenuated.

Content analysis of in-person interviews with luxury shoppers in Paris identified 11 discrete social media engagement behaviors. Findings indicate that consumer engagement behaviors (CEBs) have different potential for luxury brand cocreation depending on their intended audience, degree of applied effort and creativity, complexity of motivations, and dominant content creation style, but not on choice of social media platform. Luxury marketers can preserve their unique positioning in social media by offering top-quality visual content reinforcing the desired brand associations to (a) generate active and creative behaviors by influentials and (b) promote low-effort, high-virality behaviors by consumers motivated by less complex needs.

This research introduces \"brand prominence,\" a construct reflecting the conspicuousness of a brand's mark or logo on a product. The authors propose a taxonomy that assigns consumers to one of four groups according to their wealth and need for status, and they demonstrate how each group's preference for conspicuously or inconspicuously branded luxury goods corresponds predictably with their desire to associate or dissociate with members of their own and other groups. Wealthy consumers low in need for status want to associate with their own kind and pay a premium for quiet goods only they can recognize. Wealthy consumers high in need for status use loud luxury goods to signal to the less affluent that they are not one of them. Those who are high in need for status but cannot afford true luxury use loud counterfeits to emulate those they recognize to be wealthy. Field experiments along with analysis of market data (including counterfeits) support the proposed model of status signaling using brand prominence.

The present research examines how ambient scents affect consumers' spatial perceptions in retail environments, which in turn influence customers' feelings of power and, thus, product preference and purchasing behavior. Specifically, the authors demonstrate that in a warm- (vs. cool-) scented and thus perceptually more (vs. less) socially dense environment, people experience a greater (vs. lesser) need for power, which manifests in increased preference for and purchase of premium products and brands. This research extends knowledge on store atmospherics and customer experience management through the effects of ambient scent on spatial perceptions and builds on recent research on power in choice contexts.

Abstract Long-standing wisdom and academic research consistently agree that consumers choose attractive products and avoid ugly ones. And yet, multiple luxury brands successfully sell distinctively ugly products. This research provides an explanation, identifying distinctive ugliness as a signal of luxury and examining its impact on consumer choice. We explore this in seven studies, including a field study, a market pricing analysis, and five controlled laboratory experiments, three with consequential behavioral measures, incorporating a variety of fashion products, brands, aesthetic manipulations, and audiences. When products are from a non-luxury brand, consumers choose the attractive option and avoid the ugly. However, when from a luxury brand, consumers choose distinctively ugly products as often as attractive ones, not despite their ugliness but due to their ugliness and resulting ability to signal luxury. As such, brand prominence offers a boundary condition, as both a loud logo and distinctive ugliness serve to signal. Implications for both luxury and non-luxury brands are discussed.

[Display omitted] ► Luxury retail strategy increasingly stands or falls on the legitimacy of a charismatic creative director. ► Luxury retail strategy enlists magical and aesthetic principles within and without the flagship retail stores. ► Adoration marketing is an alternative marketing strategy particular to luxury. ► We discuss tactics appropriate for firms that feature a charismatic figure in their marketing strategies. Luxury retail strategy differs from other retail strategies not merely in distinctive formulations of product, price, distribution, and appeals to customer distinction. Instead, it increasingly stands or falls on the legitimacy of a charismatic creative director. The director offers an aesthetic brand ideology. Luxury retail draws on the principles of art and magic to assemble the charismatic persona of the creative director and to diffuse his aesthetic ideology to the brand. Moreover, luxury retail strategy enlists magical and aesthetic principles within and without the store to achieve these ends. Finally, retail luxury is producer rather than consumer oriented and seeks to generate awe rather than community. This strategy appears to be to some extent a response to legitimacy crises provoked by recent strategic extensions of luxury brands into mass marketing. We offer some implications for marketing in which the charisma of a key personage is at stake.

Purpose This paper aims to bridge the extended reality framework and the luxury hospitality literature by providing insights into how immersive technologies using artificial intelligence (AI) can shape luxury value and consumer differentiation. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted three experimental studies comparing immersive AI versus traditional hospitality across luxury contexts (hotels, restaurants and spas). Study 1 investigates the effect of immersive AI (vs traditional hospitality) on customers’ behavioral intentions and the need for differentiation using virtual-assisted reality. Study 2 tests the underlying mechanism of the need for differentiation and luxury value in an augmented reality context. Study 3 provides additional support for the proposed underlying mechanism using virtual-assisted reality in luxury hospitality. Findings The findings reveal that immersive AI (vs traditional) luxury hospitality reduces customers’ behavioral intentions of using such services and perceived luxury value. Moreover, the findings indicate that the intention to use immersive AI (vs traditional) luxury hospitality services is contingent upon customers’ need for differentiation. Originality/value The findings have important theoretical and managerial implications for immersive technologies in luxury hospitality. They shed light on the dynamics between integrating immersive AI into luxury hospitality and its impact on customers’ differentiation motives and perceived luxury value. The findings reveal the detrimental effect of using immersive AI (vs traditional hospitality) within this context.