Guest Editorial: Luxury Branding – Strategy, Innovation and Sustainability

Abstract

Welcome to the Australasian Marketing Journal Special Issue, ‘Luxury branding: strategy, innovation and sustainability’. Luxury brands have spent decades turning design, aspiration and high-quality goods into multi-billion dollar industry. However, the coronavirus pandemic changed it all in a few short months. As a result, a major pivot is underway in the luxury marketplace as global brands and start-ups will need to rethink what luxury means to a highly coveted consumer and more importantly how to manage and adapt to rapidly changing preferences and a technologically-driven dynamic marketplace. A much stronger focus on sustainable luxury is needed to help protect the environment, increase care for animals and reuse or recycle wherever possible. However, it is also necessary because of a radical change in consumer expectations. Concurrently, promoting and selling luxury products via ever-evolving digital marketing channels is also increasingly paramount for brands to engage digitally-native and tech-savvy audiences, which inherently mandates the adoption of innovative digital tools and methods in everyday tasks. These factors are highly important for luxury brands and businesses as they weather and adapt to the Covid-19 crisis and its as-yet unrealised long-term consequences. Luxury will be redefined and expanded to mean more than it used to and, consequently, so will the competitive and consumer landscape. With these impending and imposing challenges in mind, this special issue presents seven papers that examine different aspects of luxury branding that will help guide academics’ and practitioners’ thinking as they navigate these uncertain waters. This issue opens with an article by Workman and Lee (2021), who propose a working definition of non-luxury product brand charisma and examine a non-luxury product brand charisma scale that had been adapted from a generic human charisma scale within the contextual framework of consumer–brand relationships incorporating the variables of gender, brand category (mass market vs. masstige) and related brand variables (brand engagement, brand love and brand prestige). Findings of this study provide evidence that all brands have charisma to some degree. Marketers might use this insight as they strive to create consumer–brand relationships within masstige and mass market brand categories. Following this, across two studies, Lim et al. (2021) investigate how green messages in advertisements conveying a firm’s commitment to the environment can effectively influence consumer attitudes and behavioural intentions. Further, this study examines the psychological mechanism underlying such an effect. The results of two studies show that firms’ eco-friendly efforts as revealed in advertisements for luxury products generate favourable attitudes in consumers and increase their behavioural intentions more than firms’ eco-friendly efforts as revealed in advertisements for mass products. The findings suggest that fast fashion brands should focus on building trust more than anything to increase the persuasiveness of their green message. The subsequent article by Phau et al. (2021) investigates positive and negative reciprocal effects of extensions on brand personality by varying levels of congruency and typicality, while controlling for the effects of motivation processing. The findings show that brand personality dilution occurs in response to incongruent information as well as in response to congruent information. The paper suggests that brand managers need to ensure that the extension category is congruent with the parent brand to minimise the risk of brand personality dilution. The following article by Vincent and Gaur (2021) examine consumers’ motives for using closet sharing services to satisfy their desire for luxury fashion brands. A thematic analytic procedure is carried out in six phases. The results indicate that there are eight main categories of motives for sharing closets: fashion innovativeness, hedonic experience, economic, sustainability, utilitarian, social, need for uniqueness and no burden of ownership. The authors recommend that collaborative fashion consumption platforms should position their service offerings in their promotion campaigns to reflect a fashion innovator’s lifestyle (e.g. evolving fashion sense) and their values (e.g. never wearing the same item twice). The next article by Cooper et al. (2021) examines the management of heritage brand paradox in the context of luxury corporate heritage brands. The three cases – Paspaley, the Huka Lodge and Percy Marks – offer evidence supporting the resolution of brand paradox through strategic brand management. The study provides insight into how management can remain true to the brand’s authentic core and innovatively extend the brand’s heritage, developing a three-part strategic luxury brand heritage management framework. Then Chu Lo et al. (2021) describe a discrete choice experiment examining the luxury product preferences of Chinese consumers, the largest market segment for luxury products. The authors propose and test a theoretical model investigating how product characteristics (logo prominence, price and brand), peers’ attitudes and behaviours and other individual characteristics influence consumers’ choice of a luxury bag. The paper suggests that luxury brands may benefit from reviewing whether their brand value might be extended by the addition of a high-priced line with subtle branding but with recognisable design features, to address the desires of consumers who do not want Guest Editorial: Luxury Branding – Strategy, Innovation and Sustainability