Investigating the Modified BLI Using Korean Luxury Consumers

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· 발행기관 : 아시아.유럽미래학회
· 수록지 정보 : 유라시아연구 / 18권 / 1호 / 107 ~ 124페이지
· 저자명 : 김지은

초록

The luxury brand is one of the best quality and performance brands within the product category. Consumer preferences, purchasing and use of luxury brands are often motivated by perceptions of luxuriousness and attractiveness. The brands’ luxuriousness offers psychological benefits (e.g., enhancing self-image, providing status) that contribute to meeting critical needs.
Vigneron and Johnson (2004) suggested that if you can measure your brand’s luxuriousness, you can manage it, thus, create better ideas to manage them. With that reason, they developed the Brand Luxury Index (BLI) to provide a tool to estimate the amount of perceived luxuriousness consumers associated with a brand. Their measurements included five elements: conspicuousness, uniqueness, quality, extended self, and hedonism. However, the BLI received considerable criticism, including issues of applicability beyond business students and issues of discriminatory and integrated validity.
In 2015, Kim and Johnson revised the original BLI in order to improve validity of the BLI measurement scale and increase the understanding of the words used in the original scale. As a result, the modified BLI was developed through FGI and factor analysis method and it includes five dimensions (i.e., quality, extended-self, hedonism, accessibility, and tradition), but the content of these dimensions differs from the original BLI conceptualization (i.e., conspicuousness, uniqueness, quality, hedonism, extended-self).
The modified BLI was developed in USA using responses from USA residents and the data that was collected pretty long ago, thus, this research goal was to investigate whether the modified BLI scale works with Korea participants and in these days (in 2021) as well.
The data was collected using the Google Online Survey tool, while the Survey participants were gathered a snow bowling method. A cyber university students whose major is fashion were mostly employed, and their ages and education levels vary widely. The age group, occupation group, and education level vary as follows. The average age of the survey participants was 37 years old. Most of them are women (77% female and 23% male), and the largest number of education levels were currently four-year college students or graduates, accounting for 59%. Since the questions in the questionnaire should indicate their perception of a certain brand, they were asked to answer each question for three brands. Two brands (Louis Vuitton, Coach) were assigned by the researcher, and the rest of the brands were asked by the person who participated in the survey to select and answer their favorite brands(X-brand).
As a result of the study, in this study, it was found that the five factors (14 items) included in “Modified BLI” could not properly evaluate the characteristics of luxury brands recognized by Korean consumers. Using answers to three brands (X-brand, Louis Vuitton, Coach), each brand data was put into the above model and analyzed by CFA, but all three data were not acceptable in the above model (modified BLI). In other words, it can be interpreted that the “Modified BLI” model (5 factors, 14 items) was not suitable for the Korean survey data collected in 2021 Consequently, this research revealed that the five dimensions(14 items) included in the modified BLI scale can no longer consistently access the features of luxury goods recognized by at least Korean luxury consumers. The modified BLI model(5 dimensions with 14 items) did not fit with the new data collected from Korean participants in 2021. All the model fits with the data regarding the three brands(X-brand, Louis Vuitton, Coach) were not acceptable.
This newly modified BLI in 2021 (I would like to call it “BLI version 3”) had three major differences from the previously modified BLI. At first, “highly regarded vs. well regarded” which was belongs to the “Extended Self” was removed, This results seem to indicate that the idea of openly showing brand logos may show one’s social power, the act of doing so isn’t something worth deserving respect.
The second surprising fact is that the state of being handmade is not perceived for its influence on the quality for products, but the state of being handmade itself provides a means for uniqueness and therefore comes as pleasure of consumption to consumers. While handicrafts used to be understood in the same context as quality goods when the modified version of BLI was developed in 2015, Lastly, the most interesting and dramatic change I would like to emphasize is that when researchers conducted FGI for modifying BLI around ten years ago, people did not forget to mention “timeless” or “classic” when referring to the characteristics of luxury goods. However, today, what people want from luxury goods and what companies of such products hope to pursue is innovation and leading trends and changes. There is very low covariance between other items of BLI and “timeless vs. high fashion”, which means that they are absolutely liking, quality, and exclusive, but “high fashion” instead of “Timeless”. Therefore, this “timeless vs. high fashion” item was removed because it didn’t fit for explaining recent luxury characteristics. Conclusively, luxury brand directors should not forget the fact that consumers need to perceive their brands as highly innovative and the new.
Like other studies, this study has its limitations. First, responses to the modified BLI items and perception of luxury can be influenced by participants’ brand experience. More than 90% of the respondents said they had experience buying a luxury brand, but not knowing the type of experience (e.g. positive or negative) had limitations in interpreting the results. Second, most of the people who responded to this research are more interested in fashion than the average person. Therefore, it can be said that the results of this research have both advantages and disadvantages. Because they are interested in fashion, it may have reflected the current trend of the fashion market better, but on the contrary, there may be limitations in representing the position of general consumers. Therefore, it seems that if you conduct research on various subjects in other countries as a future research, you will be able to confirm the usefulness of the BLI(3rd version) discovered this time.

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