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1. Introduction
Marketing scholars often investigate the purchase intention for brands from cultural, social, psychological and economic perspectives (Son et al., 2013; Liu et al., 2012; Bian and Forsythe, 2012; Wong and Ahuvia, 1998; Sirgy et al., 1997; Vigneron and Johnson, 2004). The underlying notions for these constructs mostly concentrate on the area of trust, satisfaction, loyalty and commitment towards the brand (Kim and Ko 2010; Martinez and Kim, 2012). However, the luxury brand category in this aspect has received special attention as it involves strong identity, high awareness, emotional attachment, exclusivity and premium pricing (Okonkwo, 2009; Phau and Prendergast, 2000; Hung et al., 2011).
The overall luxury market exceeded $965 billion in the year 2014 (Bain & Co., 2014) and in recent years, there has been increasing interest by researchers in the area of luxury brand purchase intention. Although the inherent traits of luxury brands such as distinctiveness, high transaction value, superior quality, inimitability and craftsmanship (Nueno and Quelch, 1998; Radon, 2012) signify the emotional connection that the consumers develop towards the category (Fionda and Moore, 2009), the earlier researches (Bian and Forsythe, 2012; Hung et al., 2011; Kim and Ko, 2010) in this premise did not emphasize much on the consumer’s brand-related thoughts and memories.
According to Bain & Co. (2005), consumers emphasize more on emotional benefits than on the physical attributes for the purchase of luxury brand products. Choo et al. (2012) suggest that the emotional benefits create a comprehensive and memorable experience in terms of ownership and consumption. Therefore, luxury brand marketers are capitalizing more on emotional attachment to build a long-term and sustainable customer relationship (Orth et al., 2010). Hence, Berger and Ward (2010) and Han et al. (2008) focus on another key characteristic of luxury brands; conspicuousness, which indicates the extent to which a brand is visibly marked by other people. This notion of visibility as well as the cognitive and affective bond that connect the brand to the consumers has been defined as brand prominence (Park et al., 2010). Considering the significance of social visibility and emotional connection for luxury brand, it is imperative that we incorporate brand prominence in investigating the willingness to buy luxury brands.
The literature provides little...