Market Research For Religion And Luxury Brand

Background of the study

Discuss about the Market Research for Religion and Luxury Brand.

The type of luxury consumption depends on the behavior of the consumer and the way they consume the good. There are a number of products that might not be considered as a luxury product but it can be a product that is desired. The product tends to transcend their utility. The objects that are desired will be helpful in communicating the status and others who we are. The concept of status, desire and luxury is the concept that is discussed a hundred years ago. The well known economist Thorstein Veblen  in the book ‘ The Theory of Leisure Class’ was able to explain that the act of purchasing of the expensive  items was a way of communicating by the people their social status (Schade et al. 2016). He has implied that the purchasing of the luxury goods like expensive houses, gold and diamonds was a form of Wealth signaling (Butcher and Phau 2015). The preferences of the consumer are the outcome of the individualistic choices of the human intellect and a more complex behaviour with unclear desire as a part of something bigger.  The consumption that is made is not done in vacuum. The purchases that is made by the people, the people associated, the place we live, the places we visit helps in possessing meaning for the social  identity and self identity. Researchers have shown a contradiction in the desired good purchase and the luxury goods purchase (Hurriyetdailynews.com 2016). Some of the research has shown that women they buy luxury bags to express style but some women used it for preventing stealing of men by other women. The characteristic for possessing luxury items is present in not only women but also men, young people, rich and poor.

 The main purpose of the study is to see the way the consumers they interpret the concept luxury.  There is unlimited variety of goods that is offered by the customers in the modern world. The way the buyers they make choices in the modern market with so many products and services is something that is to be looked into.  Consumer behaviour is seen to be affected by the motives and the motivation.  The proper definition of luxury consumption is subjective.  The luxury consumption might be dependent upon the brand, price or the advertisement (Lloyd and Cheah 201).  There is no universal meaning of luxury across the world. Luxury depends on the amount of money earned, the spending capacity and spending done on consumption (Joy et al. 2014). Class is an important factor that governs the purchasing decision of the people.

Problem Definition

In case of the Australian population, the younger population desires more of luxury goods for flaunting. The older generation is not much concerned with the usage of the expensive item (Liu et al. 2012).  The luxury groups of consumers are divided into the number of extroverts and the introverts. It is very important to measure the luxury that is consumed by the people as this helps in reflecting the taste patterns of the people. Luxury consumption of the people can be measured through the amount of money that is spent by the people or that they possess (Lloyd and Cheah 2015).  In order to conduct the research, the data will be generated from both the young and the old population in Australia.  It is very important for the researcher to conduct a research on the type of goods consumed then this will be helpful in the marketing agents to decide on the type of consumers they are going to target.

The following are the research questions:

• How do the consumers determine luxury consumption?
• What are factors that affect the luxury consumption?

The identification and the understanding of the consumer passion based on the luxury brand are called the art and is a part of science. With the rise of the social media  , the luxury type of brand has been able to engage more number of consumers with a deeper level of sentiments and gauge that is based on the interaction. With a number of comments on the product it is very important to understand the brands having insight the way the people they think and feel of the product, happening and the campaigns (Sikkel 2013).

The term conspicuous consumption was coined by Veblen, which has shown that the wealthier consumers they are able to distinguish themselves from the masses who are not able afford the commodity (Lloyd and Cheah 2015). Term ‘luxury’ has changed to ‘new luxury’. New luxury is the proliferation in the mass market, affordability, divorced status from the social class and availability in the mass market can show the luxury brand status (Kim, Lloyd and Cervellon 2016). The term luxury is the reciprocal of the appeal of conspicuousness as the upper end of the market. There are evidences that shown that with the rise in the price the conspicuousness of the brand also increases (De Barnier, Falcy and Valette-Florence 2012). The luxury brand has shown the conspicuous and the inconspicuous shift in the brand. It is getting difficult in the modern day, to locate the person with luxury, as there are people who rent luxury car for pleasure. With the presence of the anonymity in the urban life, it is affordable to sacrifice the less visible necessities care , food and shelter to afford the visible type of luxuries like watches , designer clothes , mobile phone which is terms as ‘ leaping luxuries’ by Belk (Chan et al. 2014). The person who does not make this type of sacrifices then there is availability of counterfeits and knockouts. These types of trends tend to dilute the status, which help in signalling status ability of luxury goods. There are evidences that have shown that well-established status will be seeking for the luxury consumption not for the status signal but the pleasure that is provided (Clift, Sim, and Sinclair 2013).

Literature Review

It is very important to understand the shift from the conspicuous to inconspicuous consumption. The data of the economy will help in understanding the purchasing patterns. In the US data , it was seen that the Hispanics and the blacks they devote a large amount of their income in case of the conspicuous consumption of  automobiles , jewellery and clothing than the whites. The differences are based on racial difference group. Since the blacks have lower income and come from lower status than whites so to flaunt their status they purchase  more visible goods to flaunt (Patino,  Pitta  and Quinones  2012).

The term luxury is very confusing as there are commodities that is used for the own personal taste or is based on the family. Since the item is affordable to that person then it is considered a normal good but a person with a lower income might be thinking eating in expensive hotels as luxury (De Barnier, Falcy and Valette-Florence 2012).

 Halo effect is the usage of the global evaluation for making the judgments regarding some particular type of traits.  The global characteristics are used for applying specific type of personality traits. The personality qualities have been only seen but these qualities have not been met. This phenomenon occurs unconsciously (Craik, 2015). Biases are unaware of due to the attractiveness of the person. The metaphor Halo is a type of phenomenon where in a particular type of characteristic outshines the other and this tends to affect the perception when the additional traits are considered (Featherstone 2013). The qualities that is associated with the attractive and the unattractive trait deal with social interation. There is a mentality that the beautiful are outgoing and  friendly and the less attractive are shy and reserve.

When there is positive network externality then there is a rise in the Bandwagon Effect. The Band Wagon effect is referred to as the demand or desire for a good who want to be stylish as the possessing of the particular type of good is in fashion (Arli, and Tjiptono 2015).  The bandwagon effect is a very important concept for framing the advertising and the marketing strategies for the manufacturing companies who appeals to go for a good  people of style and purchasing it.

When there are negative network externalities then there is a rise of the snob effect. The term snob effect shows the desire for purchasing the unique type of commodity, which holds a prestigious value. The work of snob effect is in contrary to that of the Bandwagon effect.  The quantity demanded of the commodity with greater amount of snob value then there will be lesser number of people who would be owning it. The gap that is present in the research is that there is no well-defined definition of luxury. Luxury tends to differ from the person to person.

Research methodology is a very important part of the research study. The researcher needs to apply the right research design so that the research objective can be met (Flick, 2015). In order to understand the luxury consumption pattern of the people there is a need for asking questions regarding their lifestyle , the class they belong to and the  income pattern of the respondents. This would be helpful in distinguishing the type consumption.  The questions that would be asked would be close ended and quantitative in nature (Cechanowicz et al. 2013).  The responses of the people will be measured in the five point likert scale. There would be collection of the primary as well as secondary data for the research.

The secondary research is based on the literature review, which is gathered from different type of different journal articles, books and the magazines (Blumberg, Cooper and Schindler 2014).  Primary research is done on the consumers of luxury items.

For primary collection of the data, it would be done through the distribution of the questionnaire 50 respondents from Australia who indulges in the consumption of the luxury goods (Taylor, Bogdan and DeVault 2015). The data would be collected within a timeframe of 3 to 6 months, which is June to December.

The sources for the data in case of the secondary research would be ideally collected from the recent journal articles on the luxury consumption behavior pattern of the people of Australia. The targeted populations among the respondents were mainly the young population who are within the age group of 25 to 30. This group mainly concentrates on luxury consumption. The 50 respondents who were selected through the simple random sampling so that there is  people with almost all the age group. This will help in lowering the biasness in the result (Panneerselvam 2014).

The marketing managers will read this report as type of consumption pattern of the people is very important for them to decide the type of commodity to be designed for a particular segment. The manager on the basis of their luxury consumption will be deciding upon the advertising of the products. The manager might advertise a particular type of a product in a particular city while it might not promote that brand in another city as the latter city might have consumers who are not having the similar taste patterns or income. Thus, the Veblen effect, snob effect and the personality traits will help in deciding the products to be sold.

In order to perform any type of research, there is a quite amount of effort invested for it.  The research would be done for 3 to 4 hours on a daily basis for a period of 3 to 6 months. During this time frame the data will be collected and the report will be written.  The research would be taking around 12 weeks to complete. This is an acceptable period as primary collection of data is quite time consuming than conducting secondary research.  The quantitative form of the research will help in gathering accurate amount of data, which would fulfil the objective. The research will be conducted during the time of June to December.

References:

Arli, D. and Tjiptono, F., 2015. Religion and Luxury Brand: Friend or Foe? Exploring the Impact of Religiousness on Luxury Brands Possession among Youth. In 2015 Academy of Marketing Conference: The Magic in Marketing (Lisa O’Malley 7 July 2015 to 9 July 2015) (pp. 1-13). Academy of Marketing.

Blumberg, B.F., Cooper, D.R. and Schindler, P.S., 2014. Business research methods. McGraw-hill education.

Butcher, L. and Phau, I. (2015). Brand Prominence and Status in Luxury Consumption. GFMC, 3(2), pp.318-323.

Cechanowicz, J., Gutwin, C., Brownell, B. and Goodfellow, L., 2013, October. Effects of gamification on participation and data quality in a real-world market research domain. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Gameful Design, Research, and Applications (pp. 58-65). ACM.

Chan, W.W., To, C.K., Chu, A.W. and Zhang, Z., 2014. Behavioral Determinants that Drive Luxury Goods Consumption: A Study within the Tourist Context. Research Journal of Textile and Apparel, 18(2), pp.84-95.

Clift, R., Sim, S. and Sinclair, P., 2013. Sustainable Consumption and Production: quality, luxury and supply chain equity. In Treatise on sustainability science and engineering (pp. 291-309). Springer Netherlands.

Craik, J., 2015. Challenges for Australian fashion. Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management, 19(1), pp.56-68.

De Barnier, V., Falcy, S. and Valette-Florence, P. (2012). Do consumers perceive three levels of luxury? A comparison of accessible, intermediate and inaccessible luxury brands. J Brand Manag, 19(7), pp.623-636.

Featherstone, M., 2013. The Rich and the Super-rich: Mobility, Consumption and Luxury Lifestyle. Consumer Culture, Modernity and Identity, pp.3-44.

Flick, U., 2015. Introducing research methodology: A beginner’s guide to doing a research project. Sage.

Hurriyetdailynews.com. (2016). Fashion – Luxury Consumption. [online] Available at: https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/luxury-consumption.aspx?pageID=500&eid=154 [Accessed 3 Jul. 2016].

Joy, A., Wang, J., Chan, T., Sherry, J. and Cui, G. (2014). M(Art)Worlds: Consumer Perceptions of How Luxury Brand Stores Become Art Institutions. Journal of Retailing, 90(3), pp.347-364.

Kim, J.E., Lloyd, S. and Cervellon, M.C., 2016. Narrative-transportation storylines in luxury brand advertising: Motivating consumer engagement.Journal of Business Research, 69(1), pp.304-313.

Liu, F., Li, J., Mizerski, D. and Soh, H., 2012. Self-congruity, brand attitude, and brand loyalty: a study on luxury brands. European Journal of Marketing,46(7/8), pp.922-937.

Lloyd, J. and Cheah, I. (2015). Factors Affecting Consumer Attitude and Purchase Intention of Luxury Brands. GFMC, 5(2), pp.728-733.

Panneerselvam, R., 2014. Research methodology. PHI Learning Pvt. Ltd..

Patino, A., Pitta, D.A. and Quinones, R., 2012. Social media’s emerging importance in market research. Journal of Consumer Marketing, 29(3), pp.233-237.

Schade, M., Hegner, S., Horstmann, F. and Brinkmann, N., 2016. The impact of attitude functions on luxury brand consumption: An age-based group comparison. Journal of business research, 69(1), pp.314-322.

Sikkel, D. (2013). Brand relations and life course: Why old consumers love their brands. J Market Anal, 1(2), pp.71-80.

Taylor, S.J., Bogdan, R. and DeVault, M., 2015. Introduction to qualitative research methods: A guidebook and resource. John Wiley & Sons.