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Franck Vigneron is assistant professor of Marketing, College of Business & Economics, California State University Northridge, 18111 Nordhoff Street, Northridge CA 91330-8376, USA, [email protected]. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Professor Lester W. Johnson, Monash Mt. Eliza Business School, Monash University, PO Box 2224, Caulfield Jct., Victoria 3161, Australia. The authors thank the editor Morris B. Holbrook for his helpful suggestions, as well as three anonymous JCMR reviewers for their useful comments, on earlier versions of the manuscript.
As a result of the spectacular growth of luxury markets 1 over the past ten years, the marketing literature has recently seen substantial interest in the study of prestige brands2. Yet, little is known about how to best market and monitor prestige brands. Research in the UK by the market research firm Applied Futures anticipated important social changes as the year 2000 nears (Powderly and MacNulty 1990). Their research identified that people's needs for appearances and materialism were increasing. That is, they recognized an increasing demand for conspicuous and status products. In Australia recent market reports seem to support this prediction. The Sunday Telegraph reported a phenomenal increase in Australia's imports of luxury goods, such as increases in demand for mink furs (+1130.8% change from 1995/96), and diamonds (+27.5% change from 1995/96). "Australians have embarked on a shopping spree for imported luxury goods, with sales of diamonds, furs, caviar and champagne jumping this year" (Rees 1997, 8). The United States' economic recovery and the fast growing demand in Asia (before the slowdown that started in 1997) have also contributed to boost the growth of the luxury market in recent years (Echikson 1994).
Early research on this topic mainly started last century3 from work of John Rae (1834), Thorstein Veblen (1899) and Keasbey (1903). Recently the marketing literature has focused its study of luxury brands, specifically in terms of brand extensions (Roux 1995), conflict management between mass-marketing and luxury principles (Bechtold 1991; Roux 1994; Roux and Floch 1996), and measures of attitudes toward the luxury concept (Dubois and Duquesne 1993b; Dubois and Laurent 1994). Currently, the luxury market is taking a new direction with unprecedented demand coming from Asian countries, and thus research has focused on the cross-cultural comparison of attitudes toward the luxury concept...