Modern vs. Traditional Luxury Brand Personality and Digital Strategy: An Abstract

Abstract

Luxury brands are adapting to the online environment (e.g., Gucci 2018). Yet, some marketers suggest that “digitalization of luxury brands” is somewhat paradoxical, since customers of luxury brands expect exclusive access, insider knowledge, and more personalized, intimate service than online environment can offer (Popomaronis 2017). While a luxury brand’s online presence can heighten awareness and desire, it can also decrease perceptions of rarity. This produces disagreement on the optimal brand strategies in luxury marketing literature (Baker et al. 2018; Kapferer and Bastien 2012; Geerts and Veg-Sala 2011; Okonkwo 2009). Could it be the case that digital presence has favorable impact on some luxury brands, but not on others? The primary goal of this paper is to determine whether digital presence leads to differential consumer outcomes depending on the luxury brand personality.

One of the personality traits discussed in prior literature is the temporal perspective of the brand. Building on the existing literature (Aaker 1997; Heine 2009; Roux et al. 2017), we define it as follows. Modern brand personality refers to perceived differentiating brand characteristics that embody present-orientation and future-orientation. This includes openness to change, progressiveness, trendiness, youthfulness, openness to new experiences, forward-thinking, creativity and excitement. Traditional brand personality refers to perceived differentiating brand characteristics that embody past-orientation. This includes conservatism, knowledge, experience, craftsmanship and customs.

A pretest conducted on a sample of European consumers (N = 38, M_age = 23; 52.6% women) determined the typology of luxury brands for future studies. It suggests that modern and traditional brand personality traits are not mutually exclusive. Each brand personality is characterized by both perceptions of modernity and perceptions of traditionality, while one of these traits might be perceived stronger than another.

Next, an experimental study (N = 146, M_age = 28; 71.9% women) was conducted that employed 2 (Luxury brand: modern vs. traditional) × 2 (Social media page: shown vs. not) between-subjects design. The more modern brand was more influenced by the presence of the social media page than the traditional brand. Specifically, for the more traditional brand, viewing the social media page did not influence its website evaluations. In contrast, viewing the social media page of the modern luxury brand decreased its website evaluations. We speculate that this is because the modern brand was seen as less special after viewing its social media page, and these negative associations affected downstream consumer judgments when evaluating the brand website.