The abstractness of luxury
Highlights
► Consumers mentally represent luxury goods more abstractly than ordinary goods. ► Products are seen as more luxurious when described abstractly (vs. concretely). ► Real descriptions of luxury products are more abstract than those of ordinary goods.
Introduction
Almost every day, consumers spend money on necessities such as food, clothing, or electricity. At times, however, they may indulge in luxury goods that are less essential, such as expensive wines, luxury cars, cruises, or fragrances (Kivetz & Simonson, 2002). For most people luxury purchases are exceptions to the rule. To some extent the mere essence of luxury is that it is a special treat that is out of the ordinary. Moreover, the majority of consumers cannot afford indulging in luxury every day. Thus, for the majority of people, luxury goods usually appear to be more psychologically distant than necessity goods. Building on the relationship between psychological distance and abstract mental representations (Trope and Liberman, 2000, Trope and Liberman, 2003, Trope and Liberman, 2010), we propose an association between luxury and abstractness of mental representations in the present research.
According to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, luxury is “something inessential but conducive to pleasure and comfort” or “something expensive or hard to obtain” (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000). The first definition relates luxury to pleasure and desirability (see also Kemp, 1998), whereas the second definition emphasizes the exclusivity of luxury. As such, although highly desirable, luxury is affordable only by few people. Accordingly, luxury goods are usually reserved for the higher upper-class society (Miyazaki et al., 2005, Nuemo and Quelch, 1998, Silverstein and Fiske, 2003) and are therefore associated with social distance. Moreover, because of this exclusiveness, the ordinary consumer does not have a lot of experiences with luxury products and services. In many cases the purchase of luxury goods is merely hypothetical, for example when consumers dream of buying fancy sports cars or acquiring extravagant jewelry. In addition to social distance and hypotheticality, luxury is related to other distance dimensions as well (i.e., temporal and spatial distance): Purchasing luxury products is often characterized by long delays or requires calling on remote providers and international dealers. For instance, it is typical for luxury vacations to travel to an exotic, distant destination.
In a qualitative analysis of consumers’ perceptions of luxury, Dubois, Laurent, and Czellar (2001) found that the luxury concept is not one-dimensional but multifaceted. Many of the features that define luxury, however, can be mapped on the dimension of psychological distance. For instance, luxury is often described as being of excellent quality, which means that the ingredients or components in luxury products are exceptional and superior to items individuals commonly find. A very high price of luxury goods is usually perceived as a barrier that renders luxury goods and services as inaccessible. And in accordance with the dictionary definition, consumers perceive luxury as scarce and unique. Some consumers even indicated that they feel “foreign to the world of luxury” (Dubois et al., 2001).
All these factors may contribute to the perception of luxury as psychologically distant. Since luxury goods are relatively exclusive and expensive, and experiences with them are usually limited, they may generally be perceived as more psychologically distant than necessities.
Additional research suggests that the converse relationship between distance and luxury may also exist: Items on which consumers spend only little money, or which are not purchased at all, are perceived to be more luxurious than items which consumers often buy and have experience with (Kemp, 1998). Thus, a large psychological distance contributes to consumers’ perceptions of a product as luxurious.
A crucial aspect of the present research is that psychological distance is strongly associated with an abstract mental representation (Bar-Anan et al., 2006, Liberman et al., 2007, Liviatan et al., 2008). This basic principle can be derived from Construal Level Theory (CLT, Trope and Liberman, 2000, Trope and Liberman, 2003, Trope and Liberman, 2010; for reviews in consumer-related contexts, see Eyal et al., 2009, Trope et al., 2007), which proposes that psychological distance from an object or event (i.e., temporal, spatial, social distance, or probability) enhances the tendency to construe a more abstract, generalized representation of that object or event. That is, psychological distance leads consumers to represent objects and events in terms of their high-level, central aspects with fewer details and less contextual information. Psychological proximity, in contrast, leads consumers to construe objects and events relatively more in terms of their low-level, secondary aspects. Low-level construals thereby include more details, contextual information, and subordinate features of the respective object or event. For example, the consumption activity “eating” can be construed as “chewing and swallowing” (concrete, low-level representation) or as “getting nutrition” (abstract, high-level representation), depending on the psychological distance from this action.
By now, a huge body of evidence provides support for CLT. For example, increased distance led participants to include more objects into a category, indicating that participants thought about the objects in rather superordinate, abstract terms (Liberman, Sagristano, & Trope, 2002). Distance also increases the tendency to focus on the central features instead of peripheral features of objects, which suggests a more abstract, generalized representation of the objects. For example, participants evaluated a radio with a good sound quality (a primary feature of radios) better than a radio with a good clock (a secondary feature of radios), but this effect was more strongly pronounced when the purchase was imagined in the distant future and less pronounced when the purchase was imagined in the near future (Trope & Liberman, 2000). Additionally, distance causes consumers to use generalized information in evaluating an object of purchase. That is, consumers tend to rely more on global averaged ratings of products than on single recommendations when the purchase is psychologically distant (Ledgerwood, Wakslak, & Wang, 2010).
Importantly, such effects generalize to other tasks and judgments as well. For example, individuals demonstrated more abstract thinking on an unrelated task when psychological distance had been manipulated in a previous task (Förster et al., 2004, Liberman and Förster, 2009). Taken together, psychological distance causes consumers “to see the forest instead of the trees.”
Because psychologically distant objects are mentally represented more abstractly than proximal objects (Liberman et al., 2007, Trope and Liberman, 2000, Trope and Liberman, 2003, Trope and Liberman, 2010, Trope et al., 2007) and, as outlined before, luxury is associated with higher distance, one could speculate that luxury would be strongly associated with a more abstract representation than necessities or ordinary goods. In the present research, we thus propose the following: H1 Consumers mentally represent luxury goods more abstractly than ordinary goods. Ordinary goods are represented more concretely than luxury goods.
We tested this hypothesis in the first study. Specifically, we analyzed whether consumers describe situations that involve luxury objects in a more abstract language than situations that involve comparably mundane objects. In this study, we determined the degree of abstractness of the descriptions with the Linguistic Category Model (Semin and Fiedler, 1988, Semin and Fiedler, 1991; see below).
Previous research has demonstrated that the relationship between psychological distance and level of representation is bi-directional. That is, not only are distant objects represented more abstractly than proximal objects, abstract mental representations are perceived as being more psychologically distant than concrete representations, as well. We would therefore also predict the following: H2 Products that are described in abstract language are perceived as more luxurious than products that are described in concrete language.
We tested this converse relationship in a second study.
Finally, a third study investigated whether the abstract representation of luxury exists in the real world. We proposed the following: H3 Real world product descriptions of luxury products tend generally to be more abstract than real world descriptions of ordinary goods.
In summary, we investigated the bi-directional relationship between luxury and abstractness of mental representations in three studies. Study 1 tested whether consumers describe situations that involve luxury objects in more abstract language than situations that involve comparably mundane objects. Study 2 tested the converse relationship that products that are described in abstract language are perceived as more luxurious than products that are described in concrete language. Finally, Study 3 tested whether actual product descriptions of luxury goods are more abstract than descriptions of ordinary goods.
Section snippets
Study 1: Luxury influences level of representation
In Study 1, which was framed as a creativity study, we asked participants to write a short story by using words that are associated with luxury or not. The stories were analyzed with the Linguistic Category Model (Semin and Fiedler, 1988, Semin and Fiedler, 1991). We used stories that involved luxury (vs. ordinary) products instead of descriptions of the products as the unit of analysis. We analyzed responses this way in order to provide a relatively conservative test of our hypothesis.
Study 2: Levels of representation influence perceptions of luxury
The findings of Study 1 suggest that luxury is represented more abstractly than ordinary items. In Study 2, we tested the converse relationship and hypothesized that abstract descriptions of products would cause consumers to perceive the products as more luxurious than concrete descriptions. Such an effect would be highly interesting for advertisers, as it suggests that the level of abstractness of advertising language could possibly have further consequences on product evaluations,
Study 3: Luxury is presented abstractly
In Study 3, we were interested in the link between luxury and abstractness in real-world product descriptions. Descriptions of diverse luxury and necessity products were located on the Internet and analyzed with the LCM regarding their linguistic abstractness. We compared (1) luxury products with necessity products (e.g., fragrances vs. detergents), (2) two instances of the same product type (e.g., luxury cars vs. cheap cars), and (3) products within specific brands (e.g., the most expensive
General discussion
The findings of the present research suggest that luxury is associated with an abstract mental representation. Study 1 showed that thinking of luxury causes consumers to use more abstract language. Study 2 demonstrated that abstract product descriptions are perceived as more luxurious than concrete product descriptions. Study 3 found that advertisers tend to use more abstract language when they describe their luxury products.
We suggest that this association between luxury and abstractness is
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a grant (#PA00P1_124124) from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) awarded to the first author. We thank Martina Stickelberger and Stefanie Ochs for coding the texts of Study 1 and the materials used in Study 2, Claudia Bischoff for her help with Study 3, Natalie Meier for her help throughout the project, as well as Elinor Amit, Klaus Fiedler, Amber Lin, and Jillian Swencionis for helpful comments on an earlier version of this text.
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