What Makes a Luxury Brand: The Effect of Competence and Warmth Cues on Luxury Perception

Luxury, a concept once used to delineate class-oriented exclusivity, appears to becoming increasingly popular and prevalent among today’s mass market consumers. Not only has the size of the global luxury market grown exponentially to approximately 1 trillion dollars, but consumers are joining the world of luxury consumption from mature and emerging markets alike (BCG report 2010). Given the large footprint of luxury products and services, an important challenge for marketers is to better understand the antecedents of a brand being perceived to be a luxury. The current research explores whether and how luxury perception can be influenced by cues of competence and warmth. While warmth is an assessment of others’ intentions towards the self, competence captures others’ ability to carry out intentions towards the self (e.g. Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002; Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick, 2007). Applying this framework to branding, Aaker, Garbinsky, and Vohs (2012) found that while being judged high on either competence or warmth contributes to purchase intention for a brand, being judged high on both warmth and competence gives brands an extra boost in purchase intention, which they termed the “golden quadrant”. However, in many situations, a brand might have the bandwidth to only advertise or represent itself as either competent or warm. The present research asks how each of these factors independently contributes to the luxury perception for brands.