Consumer Emotions Research in Luxury Contexts in Emerging Economies

Introduction

The concept of luxury has changed a lot over the last decades before it refers to smaller things like wine, cars, clothes and watches. (Srinivasan, Srivastava, & Bhanot, 2015). Luxury is a generic way of describing products, services or lifestyles and its conceptualization also depends on issues related to the consumer experience. (Wiedmann, Hennigs, & Siebels, 2007). Luxury goods have an excellent reputation for being of good quality, rare, unique and expensive, so these characteristics illustrate functional, symbolic or experimental values in the perceptions of owners (Srinivasan et al., 2015).

Consumer behaviour is a continuous process, not only of what happens when a consumer delivers money or a credit card and in turn, receives some good or service (Solomon, 2016). A buying process starts when the consumer feels a need to have something. This process has some steps before, during and after the purchase of some good or service (Secco, Oliveira, & Amorim, 2014). Kotler and Keller (2006) concluded that several factors influence purchasing behaviour, such as cultural, social, personal and psychological factors. According to the authors, culture is the primary determinant of the response and desires of the person, so that, as the child grows, acquires values, perceptions, preferences and behaviours specific to his family and other institutions. Social factors are related to family, status, friends, among other means in society (Secco et al., 2014). Personal factors refer to age and stage in the life cycle, occupation, economic circumstances, personality, self-image, lifestyle and values (Kotler & Keller, 2006). Psychological factors refer to the understanding of human behaviour, analyzing its consumption needs (Secco et al., 2014). In the luxury context, these factors gain enormous importance and are sometimes difficult to understand at different levels.

Consumer research literature currently has few studies about consumer emotions in emerging economies, except for some studies in China, such as the research of Osburg (2013), Dong and Tian (2009), Joy et al. (2018), and Tian and Dong (2010). A detailed discussion of consumer sentiments in consumer culture theory is similarly absent (Gopaldas, 2014). Also, we have to state that emotional responses have been considered an influential antecedent to consumer assessment, mainly related to hedonic products. (Kim, Park, Lee, & Choi, 2016), as luxury products. Hence, our main objective for this proposed chapter is to focus on the emotional experience in luxury contexts on emerging economies.