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INTRODUCTION
Many consumers spend large amounts of their income on luxury brands. Luxuries are brands associating with a premium quality and/or an aesthetically appealing design. In addition, luxury brands are exclusive, which implies expensiveness and/or rarity (Phau and Prendergast, 2000; Catry, 2003; Okonkwo, 2007; Caniato et al , 2009; Kapferer and Bastien, 2009; Tynan et al , 2010). According to economic theory, demand for luxury brands increases when income increases (Mason, 1981; Berry, 1994; Kemp, 1998; Vickers and Renand, 2003). However, income alone might not explain all luxury purchases (Dubois and Duquesne, 1993). Even consumers who have a very low income and who can hardly meet their basic needs spend money on luxury brands (Van Kempen, 2007).
Classical economic theory, which assumes that humans are rational and when buying a product they aim to maximize utility, cannot explain why people spend their money on such expensive products that have no additional utilitarian benefits compared to their cheaper counterparts. However, luxuries offer psychological benefits to consumers that cheaper products may not (Vigneron and Johnson, 2004). In this respect, both expressive and impressive dimensions of luxury brands may motivate consumers to purchase these brands (Dubois and Laurent, 1996; Wong and Ahuvia, 1998; Kapferer and Bastien, 2009; Wiedmann et al , 2009). Past research mainly focused on consumers' expressive motives to purchase luxury brands (for example, Han et al , 2010; Truong et al , 2010; Linssen et al , 2011).
These expressive purchase motives refer to the consumption of luxury brands because they can signal hidden information about the owner to significant others. These latent characteristics might be wealth, status or personality characteristics (Miller, 2009). In general, expressive motives to buy luxury brands have three underlying dimensions: need for uniqueness, need for conformity and need for communicating one's own identity. First, luxuries can be used to distinguish oneself from the lower classes (Veblen, 1899/1979; Mason, 1981). Leibenstein (1950) refers to this phenomenon as the 'snob effect'. This snob effect appears when a consumer can afford a luxury brand, while most other consumers cannot afford this brand.
In addition to the need for uniqueness, consumers also have a need for conformity (Brewer, 1991). This need for conformity implies that consumers purchase luxury brands because they want to conform...