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Revisiting the Brand Luxury Index: new empirical evidence and future directions

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Abstract

Studies increasingly question the robustness of luxury marketing’s most prominent scale, Vigneron and Johnson’s (J Brand Manag 11(6):484–506, 2004) Brand Luxury Index (BLI). However, these studies’ isolated and occasionally obscure nature has kept this issue outside marketing’s mainstream. Given the contextual/methodological differences between these studies, calls to evaluate the BLI further, and the importance of ascertaining this instrument’s robustness, this research is the first to systematically address the issue and provide more conclusive evidence of BLI performance. This paper comprises four studies with US students, Chinese students, US consumers, and pooled data. Results consistently indicate that the BLI is factorially unstable. On average, only 30% of its items operate adequately. The present results confirm growing BLI concerns. We conclude that luxury brand dimensionality remains unresolved. Luxury marketing still requires valid, reliable, and generalizable luxury brand taxonomies/scales to further advance. This area offers ample research opportunities. We examine alternative ways to develop future luxury brand scales and offer recommendations for research in this area.

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  1. University of Colorado - Denver, Denver, USA

    Francisco J. Conejo, Lawrence F. Cunningham & Clifford E. Young

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Conejo, F.J., Cunningham, L.F. & Young, C.E. Revisiting the Brand Luxury Index: new empirical evidence and future directions. J Brand Manag 27, 108–122 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41262-019-00168-4

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