“ As luxury penetrated into the masses, defining luxury has become ever so difficult. ”
While the word ‘luxury’ is used in daily lives to refer to certain lifestyle, the underlying construct’s definition is consumer and situation specific. If you earn less than $ a day, an ice-cream would be a really big luxury item for you. On the other hand, if you are going to a party with some big-wigs a $100,000 car may not be a luxury. The word luxury originates from the Latin term “luxus” signifying, “soft or extravagant living, indulgence, sumptuousness or opulence”. However, luxury is quite slippery term to define because of the strong involvement of human element and value recognition from others.
Many other attempts have been made to define luxury using the price-quality dimension stating higher priced products in any category is luxury. Similarly, researchers have used the uniqueness aspects of luxury too. However, with increasing quality orientation from lower end brands and massification of luxury, it is hard to use either of the above dimensions to define luxury.
Prof. Jean-Noel Kapferer, takes an experiential approach and defines luxury as items which provide extra pleasure by flattering all sense at ones. Several other researchers, focus on exclusivity dimension and argue that luxury evokes a sense of belonging to a certain elite group. However, having an LVMH hang bag in central districts of any big city across the world, won’t make you feel that way. Rather in one of the earlier posts on my website, when I asked the question ‘if others can have it, is it luxury?’ consumers responded clearly saying that LVMH and Gucci are losing their lustre by the day in their minds.
The discussion above highlights the extremely subjective and multidimensional nature of the luxury construct. The attempts very much define a dimension of luxury such as high price, high quality, uniqueness, exclusivity etc.
However, it is still unclear ‘What is Luxury?’
So what do you think is luxury to you?
Paurav Shukla, Senior Lecturer, University of Brighton
