The atypicality of sustainable luxury products

Abstract

This study tackles the issue of how consumers might perceive luxury products' sustainability-focused communication. We compare consumers' reactions when luxury brands communicate their focus on either product sustainability or product excellence (i.e., a sustainability-vs. excellence-focused communication strategy, respectively). We predict that consumers perceive the former as more atypical for a luxury brand, which renders the communication more effective at enhancing consumers' willingness to buy the brand's products. Across six experiments, we demonstrate that perceived atypicality mediates the effect of luxury product communication strategy on consumers' willingness to buy; that perceived atypicality increases willingness to buy by increasing consumers' perception about the uniqueness of the communication strategy; that the effect of perceived atypicality is stronger for consumers with a higher chronic need for uniqueness; and that the greater effectiveness of a sustainability-focused communication strategy on atypicality and willingness to buy is peculiar to luxury products (i.e., it does not manifest for mass-market products). From a managerial perspective, our findings demonstrate that luxury brands may innovate their communication strategies by leveraging sustainability rather than product excellence.

Love Luxury, Love the Earth: An Empirical Investigation on How Sustainable Luxury Consumption Contributes to Social-Environmental Well-Being

“…Some studies have argued that sustainability is incompatible with luxury (Achabou and Dekhili 2013;Davies, Lee and Ahonkhai 2012;Kapferer and Michaut-Denizeau 2014;Voyer and Beckham 2014). Luxury is commonly associated with personal pleasure, complexity, and conspicuousness, while sustainability is related to altruism, sobriety, moderation, and ethics (Amatulli et al, 2020b;Amatulli, De Angelis and Donato 2021;Athwal et al 2019;Batat and Khochman 2022;Naderi and Strutton 2015). However, other studies have shown that sustainability and luxury are a good fit.…”

The impact of socioeconomic status on preferences for sustainable luxury brands

“…Because there was no “neutral” point in our measure (not at all charitable–very charitable), we conducted a separate posttest ( n = 99, M _age = 36.28, SD = 10.75; 22.2% female, Amazon Mechanical Turk) to address this concern. We randomly assigned participants to either the sustainable luxury or regular luxury brand condition and asked them to rate whether the brand was “sustainable,” “pro‐environmental,” and “charitable” (Cronbach's α = 0.887; adapted from Amatulli et al, 2021; Septianto et al, 2021), as measured on a 7‐point scale (1 = strongly disagree, 4 = neutral, 7 = strongly agree). As expected, perceived sustainability was higher in the sustainable luxury brand condition than in the regular luxury condition ( M_ regular = 4.10, SD = 1.87 vs. M_ sustainable = 5.53, SD = 0.93, F (1, 97) = 23.12, p < 0.001, η 2 = 0.192).…”

Cause‐related marketing of luxury brands: Nudging materialists to act prosocially

“…Unlike luxury brands that focus on prestige as well as high quality, value brands focus on value‐for‐the‐money (Palmeira & Thomas, 2011). As compared with value brands, the price premium that is paid to purchase luxury brands, along with the scarcity message (i.e., special‐edition), makes them a costly signal for status (Amatulli et al, 2021; Hagtvedt & Patrick, 2016; Nelissen & Meijers, 2011). For nonmaterialists, however, we do not have firm predictions regarding the preferences for the different CRM campaigns as a function of luxury versus value brands.…”

“…However, CRM campaigns can pose particular problems for luxury brands because they may represent a conflict between self‐enhancement motivations underlying the consumption of luxury products and self‐transcendence motivations underlying prosocial behavior (Torelli et al, 2012). Although luxury is a subjective concept whose meaning is “specific to a particular time and place” (Belk, 1999, p. 41), it is typically associated with “excess, personal pleasure, superficiality, ostentation, high quality, conspicuousness, and resistance to external normative influence” (Amatulli et al, 2021, p. 1992). Furthermore, a recent study conceptualizes luxury brands as consisting of five dimensions—quality, authenticity, prestige, premium price, and resonance (Ko et al, 2019).…”