Luxury retailers are faced with a major problem during the holiday season. For rich people spending during the holidays can many times result in extreme guilt…So if luxury brands want to make profits during the holiday season they have to understand how to make wealthy people spend guilt free.
The prefect solution to solve this problem for luxury brands is to team with charities especially during the holiday season. Creating a influential guilt-free consumption to buy luxury goods by knowing the purchase will also do good.
Luxury Brands Guilt-free Consumption
According to Eurek Alert, luxury marketers will spend millions of dollars this year on retail décor to help convert consumer desire into purchases. Since these retail spaces are designed to dazzle consumers with the luster of luxury, they aren’t perceived as a good place to promote partnerships with charity. But Hagtvedt and Marketing Professor Vanessa Patrick of the C.T. Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston challenge this notion with evidence that the cash register may in fact be the best place for a luxury brand to partner with charity.
These authors conducted three experiments with 342 college students and adults to support their insights.
In one study, participants could purchase either a luxury brand (Godiva) or a value brand (M&M’s). Without any mention of charity, 47% chose to purchase the luxury brand. However, when participants were told that the Godiva chocolates were made and sold in association with the World Wildlife Fund, the choice of Godiva jumped to 78%. Follow-up experiments demonstrated that the willingness to purchase luxury products increased because the association with charity diminished the participants’ feelings of guilt for purchasing a luxury product. The same pattern emerged whether the luxury products were chocolates, high-end jeans, or Rolex watches.
