Luxury Consumption Tendency: Conceptualization, Scale Development and Validation

Abstract

Luxury consumption is an appealing topic among researchers from the disciplines of psychology and marketing. Although past research on luxury consumption has provided a number of measurement tools to measure brand luxuriousness, attitudes toward the concept of luxury, perceptions of luxury, and prestige shopping preference, researchers lack a scale that measures the luxury consumption tendency using a consumer-centric approach. To this end, this paper introduces the luxury consumption tendency scale, which was produced following the conceptualization of the luxury consumption tendency. Across three studies (total N = 1428), we developed an 18-item luxury consumption tendency scale that consisted of five dimensions. In Study 1, we conducted exploratory survey research of 11 Turkish Ph.D. students, and then, exploratory factor analysis was performed with the survey data collected from 520 Turkish undergraduate students. In Study 2, confirmatory factor analysis was performed on the survey data collected from 808 Turkish adults. In Study 3, we tested the validity performance of the luxury consumption tendency scale through a between-subjects experimental design in which 100 U.S. adults were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: a low-construal level condition and a high-construal level condition. The following results were determined across the three studies: the content, concurrent, convergent, discriminant, and nomological validity performances were established through descriptive (Study 1), cross-sectional (Study 2), and experimental (Study 3) designs. Additionally, the luxury consumption tendency was found to be positively associated with conspicuous consumption and status consumption. Furthermore, we demonstrated that as the construal level increases, so does the luxury consumption tendency