Marketing

Manager une force de vente est une discipline complexe requérant un appel constant à la stratégie, au marketing, à la vente et au management des hommes. Plutôt que de laisser imposer cette discipline par la conjoncture économique, il faut lui donner une autre ...

This paper examines the impact of a number of psychological factors on consumers' propensity to engage in the “bandwagon” type of luxury consumption. It develops and empirically confirms a conceptual model of bandwagon consumption of luxury products. In general, results show that a consumer's interdependent self-concept underlies bandwagon luxury consumption. This relationship is mediated by the level of a consumer's status-seeking predispositions, susceptibility to normative influence and need for uniqueness. The study concludes that these psychological constructs explain well a large part of bandwagon luxury consumption and can be used as inputs in the development of marketing strategies.

This paper develops and tests on a probability sample of 431 consumers a model that explains three different forms of luxury buying behaviors: Bandwagon, Snob and Veblen effect(s). The findings support the postulated relationships and have both theoretical interest as well as practical implications for practitioners in various luxury sectors.

Research increasingly suggests that cultural differences may account for variation in cross-cultural consumer reactions to several phenomena of interest to marketing scholars and practitioners, such as consumer expectations, evaluations and reactions to service (Zhang, Beatty and Walsh 2008), or attitudes to consumerism in general (Tse, Belk and Zhou 1989). Despite the growing research in these domains (De Mooij 2009; Rugman and Collinson 2009), focusing mainly on consumers’ behaviors, relatively little research has examined cross-cultural differences or similarities in pre-behavioral processes such as perception and cognition – with little attempt aiming at explaining, synthesizing and extending existing evidence, especially in the light of the latest developments. Given the central role played by perception and cognition in subjective human experience and eventual behavior (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1999), studying cross-cultural differences in pre-behavioral domains is important in order to ultimately understand differences in cross-cultural consumer behaviors.

Researchers are increasingly recognizing the role of culture as a source of variation in many phenomena of central importance to consumer research. This review addresses a gap in cross-cultural consumer behavior literature by providing a review and conceptual analysis of the effects of culture on pre-behavioral processes (perception and cognition). The article highlights a series of important perceptual and cognitive differences across cultures and offers a new perspective of framing these differences among cultures—that of “culturally conditioned” perceptual and cognitive orientations. The article addresses several theoretical issues and suggests directions for future research as well as managerial implications.

This article examines the impact of various individual differences on consumers' propensity to engage in two distinct forms of conspicuous (publicly observable) luxury consumption behavior. Status seeking is an established driver, but other managerially relevant drivers can also explain conspicuous consumption of luxuries. The study develops and empirically confirms a conceptual model that shows that bandwagon and snobbish buying patterns underlie the more generic conspicuous consumption of luxuries. In addition to status seeking, the self-concept orientation regulates which of these two patterns is more prominent. Both susceptibility to normative influence and need for uniqueness mediate the influence of self-concept. The modeled psychological constructs explain a large part of the variance in conspicuous luxury consumption patterns and can be used as input in the development of marketing strategies.

Despite the reasonable explanatory power of existing models of consumers’ ethical decision making, a large part of the process remains unexplained. This article draws on previous research and proposes an integrated model that includes measures of the theory of planned behavior, personal norms, self-identity, neutralization, past experience, and attitudinal ambivalence. We postulate and test a variety of direct and moderating effects in the context of a large scale survey study in London, UK. Overall, the resulting model represents an empirically robust and holistic attempt to identify the most important determinants of consumers’ support for the fair-trade movement. Implications and avenues for further research are discussed.