Published Online:September 2023
Product Name:The IUP Journal of Brand Management
Product Type:Article
Product Code:
Author Name:Henrik Uggla
Availability:YES
Subject/Domain:Marketing
Download Format:PDF
Pages:5
Luxury marketing has matured, and the next level of research is likely to revolve around issues related to consumers, including the challenges they face in the marketplace. These issues may require more creative and innovative approaches to unfolding alternative ways of articulating and practicing luxury consumer research. The issue of consumer behavior is critical in this respect, but consumer insights and the empirical analysis will be even more crucial. In this paper, a number of areas within luxury consumer research are discussed with a focus on how they can be approached in alternative and perhaps more innovative ways with research on brand architecture, ethnography and consumer insights. This conceptual paper points to and underscores the important and subtle issues in creative luxury brand research.
The premium vs. luxury brand distinction has been discussed for years, and it has perhaps been most heavily promoted and argued for in a convincing way by Kapferer and Vincent (2019) in their book Luxury Strategy (Kapferer and Bastien, 2012). One essential difference, according to them, is that luxury brands build on endogenous qualities, super high quality, brand authenticity, craftmanship and artisanship, while premium brands build on comparison (Audi vs. BMW vs. Mercedes). Even though this line of argument has strong intuitive power and may really have face validity and strong general validity, it may also have gradual differences. What need to be researched more are: varieties between premium brands and luxury brands, such as ultra-premium brands and casualluxury, and other entities between these extremes, such as upper premium brands and super casusal-luxury brands, and general trading-up and trading-down strategies. Many concepts are heavily under-researched and must be further explored in many different instances and with a range of research methods