Brand Personality, Social Status, and Physical Vanity in Building Luxury Fashion Branded Apps

Introduction

In this global business world, companies are emphasizing more on creating global brands through effective marketing in order to create powerful brands that are able to sustain in the competitive environment. Regardless of technology related advancement such as Apps, managers spend millions on developing or maintaining a strong brand image consequently their brand is perceived to be distinctive and most unique in the eyes of the customers (O’ Cass &Lim, 2001). As consumers are increasingly attracted towards brands that appeal to their specific personality; marketers are increasingly facing the challenge to create a marketing strategy that attracts the consumers. Hence, a detailed research on this topic will further equip luxury marketers with the relevant information required to understand the market for luxury fashion brands (Rezaei, Shahijan, Valaei, Rahimi, & Ismail, 2016; Sajad, Muslim, Minoo, & Norshidah, 2016; Valaei, Rezaei, Ismail, & Moi, 2016). Furthermore, this research will help identify what kind of people who buy these products this, in turn, will aid in an effective execution of marketing strategies for luxury fashion branded Apps.

According to Euromonitor (2015), the number of luxury consumer’s goods globally intend to purchase, have more than tripled increased to around 330 million people and in the past two decades with each year more than 10 million new customers entering the market. In a multinational country, fashion brands have laid a reputation for young shoppers. In today’s culture, it has become a social trend among youngsters’ using luxury fashion brands to represent their image and reputation. These consumers have become concerned on the preferred brands for their daily usage. Fashion brand industries have also grown widely and had a lead pathway for luxury fashion market, and modern shoppers. Brand personality is increasingly becoming essential to marketers as it helps them to develop and cultivate the bond between the consumer and the brands. The stronger is the congruence between the brand personality and the consumer’s self-image, the stronger is the customer’s relationship with the brand (O’ Cass & Lim, 2001). Similarly, the influence of Social Status on consumers purchase behavior has also seen to be strong. The focus of this study is specifically on the luxury fashion goods category. This research has inspected the influencing factors on the young Malaysian consumer's purchase intentions of luxury fashion branded Apps by looking into three major factors that are brand personality, social status, and physical vanity. This research intended to find out how these symbolic values influence consumers Apps purchase intention among consumers.

While there have been an increasing number of researches ended on branding and consumer behavior especially on brand personality, social status and vanity (Mulyanegara, 2009; Hung et al., 2011; Park, Rabolt & Sook Jeon, 2008) and its influence on purchase intention, there are little researches that focus on the influence of all these factors’s collectively on purchase Intention. Also, the fact that the influence of some factors will vary from country to country cannot be denied; thus, this research will be focusing particularly on the conceptualization of branded Apps. This research will aid greater understanding in the field of branding as the influence of brand personality, social status and vanity will be studied collectively on Apps purchase intention of the luxury consumer.