Product’s Digital Transformation Effect on Perceived Luxury Level and Brand Authenticity: The Watch Industry Case: An Abstract

Businesses need to innovate in order to perpetuate their survival and existence on the market. However, companies that could not deal with the continuously fast-moving economy ended up by disappearing, such as Kodak who “missed the digital photography revolution” (Lucas and Goh 2009, p. 46). Thus, new innovative offerings can cause obsolescence and the rupture of the previous ones. However, we can witness that some companies are talking about innovation and the fact that, nowadays, ‘doing’ innovation is important, but only a few actually succeed (Tajeddini and Trueman 2008). Companies fear that the brand loses its brand aura, brand personality, and its core values (Morhart et al. 2015). In a branding context, innovation is gaining interest in marketers and researchers’ discussions. In fact, when we aim to provide real examples of luxurious and authentic brands turning their products to innovative digitalized products, we found that the market does not contain much. Although the concept of digital transformation in general has for a long period attracted lot of interests, digital transformation applied to brands and products is yet a recent research path. Thus, from a research perspective, we ignore the impact of products’ digital transformations on consumers behavior related to luxurious and authentic brands.

Our study contributes to brands’ challenges of launching innovative offerings by shading light on consumers’ behaviors toward luxurious and authentic brands in the digital era. As it was demonstrated in previous research, consumers are seduced by luxurious and authentic brands because of their perceived added value to their interior selves (De Barnier et al. 2012; Morhart et al. 2015). Thus, our research investigates on the impact of a product’s digital transformation on the perceived luxury level and brand authenticity. However, we examine the watch industry not only because of the watch added symbolic meaning on consumers (Kessous et al. 2017), but also because such an industry, globally known for its handcraft, high precision, and quality (Tajeddini and Trueman 2008), is a threatened industry by digitalization (Glasmeier 1991).