Customization in Luxury Brands: Can Valentino Get Personal?

Abstract

Luxury brands have started to offer consumers the opportunity to customize their exclusive products by making certain aesthetic decisions, such as the color, fabric, or cut of their products. A robust finding in the marketing literature is that consumers place a greater value on customized than on standard products because these unique products better fit and communicate their tastes, preferences, and identity. However, the majority of focal products in these studies fall outside the luxury segment. The authors demonstrate that consumers’ customization preferences differ between mainstream and luxury brands. In the luxury segment, consumers pay a premium for the designer’s expertise and the status that it can convey. As such, the consumers’ desire for self-expression can potentially erode the product’s signaling value. Through a series of four experiments, the authors demonstrate that luxury brands can benefit from customization but they can also take customization too far. Their findings suggest that brand managers should allow consumers to make fewer design decisions for luxury versus mainstream brands to preserve the signal value created by the designer.

Paying Twice for Aesthetic Customization? The Negative Effect of Uniqueness on a Product's Resale Value

“…For example, a pair of sneakers with a unique aesthetic design might be perceived as more attractive when the creator is a high-status celebrity or even a well-known artist. Product and brand type might be other moderators to consider (Moreau et al 2020).…”

“…For example, 44% of all new car buyers in Germany already self-customize their cars (DAT Group 2016). While the costs of producing single-unit quantities are constantly reduced due to advancements in production technologies, customers are nevertheless willing to pay a substantial price premium for the resulting products that better suit and communicate their tastes, preferences, and identity (Franke and Piller 2004; Franke and Schreier 2008; Moreau et al 2020; Townsend, Kaiser, and Schreier 2015). For this reason, mass customization is frequently considered the future of retailing (D’Angelo, Diehl, and Cavanaugh 2019; Halzack 2017).…”

How attributions of coproduction motives shape customer relationships over time

“…As each firm adopting a coproduction concept must decide on the degree of customer participation in the design and/or realization stages (Atakan et al, 2014 ) and the pricing of their coproduction concept (Stadler-Blank & Bolton, 2019 ), we propose that the outcomes of these decisions are diagnostic for customers to draw inferences about a firm’s coproduction motives. Therefore, we consider customer perceptions of three key characteristics of a coproduction concept as antecedents in our conceptual model: customer perceptions of 1) coproduction intensity (the effort and time customers required to create an outcome in the realization stage; Haumann et al, 2015 ), 2) design freedom (the number or quality of options available to customize the outcome in the design stage; Moreau et al, 2020 ), and 3) monetary savings (i.e., the amount customers can ‘save’ due to their own participation in coproduction).…”

A review and future avenues for psychological ownership in consumer research

“…Individuals also feel ownership of designs and can feel infringed upon if another seems to claim a design as their own (Kirk et al, 2018). In the context of a luxury product, consumers prefer an optimal amount of ownership realizing a professional designer has specialized knowledge and thus may be better at producing a product reflecting their identity (Moreau et al, 2020). The authors find that customization of products results in stronger ownership feelings, likely as an additional way to express an identity to the owner and to others.…”