The Role of Luxury Consumption Motivations in Luxury Brand Communication

Luxury business is one of the most important drivers of growth in many countries. One of the key factors for luxury brands’ success is their ability to elicit dream and aspiration in consumers, which is typically sustained by appropriate communication strategies, such as the presence of celebrities or the usage of specific images versus text. Also, the type of language luxury brands can use to deliver their communication messages might importantly affect their ability to fulfill consumers’ desire to dream luxury goods. In this respect, a study by Hansen and Wänke (2011) demonstrated that consumers perceive products described through abstract language as more luxurious than those described through a concrete language and attribute this result to the link between the psychological distance from consumers that typically characterizes luxury brands and abstract mental representations. Despite the relevance of these findings, we believe the effect of language abstractness on consumers’ perceptions might not always be the same. We propose and demonstrate that whether consumers perceive a luxury product described through abstract (vs. concrete) language as more luxurious may depend on the motivations driving consumers to purchase luxury products. In particular, we demonstrated that luxury consumption motivations influence the effectiveness of the type of language used in luxury brands’ communication. Abstract language is more effective than concrete language when luxury products are characterized by low versus high logo prominence and when consumers are low versus high in conspicuous consumption orientation.