View article

The nature of luxury is constantly changing and this makes it difficult to formulate a universal definition of luxury brands. The current paper aims to enrich the understanding of luxury brand meaning from a consumer perspective. In particular, this paper investigates consumers' perceptions of luxury brands based on the extent to which they associate various attributes to luxury brands. A large-scale survey in the Flemish part of Belgium reveals three facets of luxury brand meaning: an expressive facet that refers to the exclusivity of luxury brands, an impressive-functional facet that refers to premium quality and an impressiveemotional facet that refers to extraordinary aesthetic aspects. In addition, the current study distinguishes three consumer segments (i.e. impressive, expressive and mixed segment) that differ from each other for the importance they attach to these facets of luxury brand meaning. The impressive …