Status and Conspicuousness – Are They Related? Strategic Marketing Implications for Luxury Brands

TLDR

The study develops a scale to measure status and conspicuousness of luxury brands and uses it to examine their relationship. The authors employed confirmatory factor analysis and attribute rating on data from 204 French consumers. The results show that status and conspicuousness are distinct yet related dimensions of luxury brand perception, offering strategic marketing implications across three product categories, and represent the first consumer‑based empirical study distinguishing the two constructs.

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to develop a scale to measure luxury brands' status and conspicuousness using the new luxury brand context as a reference point. This scale will be utilized to establish empirical evidence that allows an exploration of the relationship between status and conspicuousness as dimensions of luxury brand perception. The study used Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Attribute Rating. The data were collected from 204 consumers in France. Status and conspicuousness are revealed to constitute two different, although related, dimensions of luxury brands and should therefore be measured as distinct constructs when assessing brand luxury. Strategic marketing implications for marketing managers are identified and discussed within the context of the three product categories. This is the first empirical study to use actual consumers in order to explore the difference between status and conspicuousness in assessing luxury brands.