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Product ratings and reviews are popular tools to support buying decisions of consumers. Many e-commerce platforms now offer product ratings and reviews as ratings and reviews are valuable for online retailers. However, luxury goods industry is somewhat slow to adapt to the digital terrain. The purpose of this paper is to answer “how luxury consumers see user-generated product ratings and reviews for their online shopping experience and what important factors or values are perceived by the luxury consumers when they shop online?”

To understand how luxury consumers use product ratings and reviews before buying online, a survey with a situational set up of variations of rating, review and price options in association with a number of hypothetical luxury goods was conducted among 421 global luxury consumers out of over 6,000 people. The study was carried out from September to October 2018 for six weeks in the form of online and mobile survey. User population is high net-worth individuals or luxury consumers derived from the author’s various professional and social networks and communities. Their geographical coverage would be global, but concentrated around the major cities.

The survey shows that ratings and reviews can be important source of information for luxury consumers. Online ratings and reviews are rated as helpful by 76.01% of the participants. People who chose the highly rated one (4.8/5) over the poorly rated (3.7/5) was 86.94%, while all else such as product category, star rating and price range are about the same. Feedback from the open question survey indicates that the perceived helpfulness of rating and review systems could vary. Comparing user reviews is time-consuming because of unstructured nature of contextual reviews and the relative nature of human perception on the rating scale.

There are two aspects of ratings and reviews playing an important role for luxury consumers’ buying decision. First, it is about helpfulness of collective rating score. Luxury consumers see a user-generated rating score and use the score when they make a choice even if the rating is not an absolute, but relative figure, not exactly like the star rating system in the hotel industry. Second, there is discrepancy between the status of the brand in association with its price position and perceived value as the industry does not cope with classifying their brands in any official star rating system.

Consumers need compact and concise information about the products they need. When there are only a few potential products left in their short wish-list, full user reviews can be helpful to get more details and general opinions about the products on the short list before making a final decision. In that regard, a primary indicator that will guide through the decision-making process of the luxury consumers would be the trustworthiness of user rating of each product in an aggregated score along with a potential use of sub-ratings, which has to be visible from the product landing page.

Even if there is a wide use and ubiquitous nature of product ratings and reviews in other consumer products, the author is curious about how luxury consumers use ratings and reviews for their buying decision because there are not that many researches done previously in spite of the importance of this issue. Luxury goods industry has hit €320bn in 2017 according to Bain and Co., and 25% of the trading volume will be replaced by the digital commerce by 2025.

The aim of the research presented in this paper is to enhance our understanding of self-gift giving behavior. Self-regulatory theory is used as a conceptual support to achieve this objective. The main idea that is explored is that consumers’ self-gift purchase intentions vary across contexts and situations to the extent that these are compatible or not with their self-regulatory mindset, whether it is chronic or situational.

Two studies, using a scenario-based experiment, were conducted to investigate the effects that regulatory focus has on consumers’ intentions to buy themselves a gift.

The results support the proposition that the chronic form of regulatory focus in success and failure situations has a significant impact on the intention to purchase a gift to oneself and show that the situational form of regulatory focus has an influence on self-gift purchase intention as well. They also confirm that situations that are congruent with consumers’ self-regulatory mindset lead to stronger self-gift purchase intentions.

The main contribution of this research lies in delineating the role that some specific dispositional and situational factors play in shaping consumers’ perceptions of success and failure events and how this impacts the eventual purchase of a gift to oneself. This contrasts with previous research on self-gift giving, where success and failure situations are assumed to be perceived similarly by consumers. Marketing managers wishing to stimulate consumers’ propensity to buy themselves gifts should consider using regulatory focus as a segmentation basis. Marketing communications should be adapted to consumers’ self-regulatory mindset.

This research seeks to explore the nature and the structure of brands' masculine dimensions; to develop a reliable and a valid scale to measure brand masculinity and to explore the different brand masculine patterns.

A series of four studies developed and validated a two-factor, five-item measurement scale for brand masculinity using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Content and face validities; reliability and internal validity; convergent and discriminant validities were established. Generalisability of the two dimensions across the gendering of product categories was assessed. A cluster analysis was used to explore brand masculine patterns.

The results indicate that brand masculinity is a bi-dimensional construct (i.e. “Male chauvinism” and “Heroic” dimensions). A cluster analysis performed on 45 brands revealed four brand masculine patterns: hegemonic, emerging, chivalrous and subaltern.

French student subjects constitute the sample. Future studies might investigate the transferability of the results to other cultures. The classification scheme broadens the existing brand personality and brand gender literature and its derived brand taxonomies.

The results provide brand managers with a marketing tool to measure their brands' masculinity and allow them to adapt specific, previously developed gendered marketing strategies.

This research contributes to the brand personality and brand gender literature with new insights about the nature and structure of brands' masculine dimensions. The study moves the conceptualisation of this construct forward rejecting thus previous monolithic approaches to brand masculinity.

This paper aims to investigate the situational and personal aspects that may trigger smokers’ psychological state reactance. It was hypothesized that situational factors, such as perceived threat to freedom and perceived loss of control, which are supposed to be triggered by an anti-smoking persuasive message, and a personality pattern, such as trait reactance proneness, predict the psychological state reactance.

An experiment and a survey were conducted on a random sample of 246 smoking undergraduate students in two Tunisian business schools. Four anti-smoking print ads, with two different levels of negative emotional intensity, were manipulated.

The findings depict the importance of the anti-smoking ads with a high negative emotional intensity, the perceived threat to freedom and trait reactance proneness in the smokers’ psychological reactance prediction.

This work seems to be important to the extent that few works have combined situational and dispositional factors to explain the smokers’ psychological reactance. The findings in this paper seem interesting insofar as they show the importance of the personality factor and the fear appeal in triggering smokers’ anger and negative cognitions that lead, in turn, to the arousal of psychological reactance. This paper should be of interest to readers in the areas of health communication, social psychology and social marketing.

The purpose of this study is to understand how narratives are generated in stores.

The study design is based on ethnographies documented in 10 sports stores in the Paris region. The ethnographic method enables a precise and in situ observation of how narratives are structured. Narrative structures develop from the accommodation of the narratives specific to retailers and narratives specific to the customer.

The findings of this study identified four main narratives in retail spaces (the serial, the tale, the epic, the legend), each of which is distinguished by the commercial/non-commercial orientation of the narratives and by a superficial/in-depth modification of the narratives produced outside the store. These four narratives are characterized by the vendors’ roles and by the distinct interactions between customers and retail stores.

The originality of this study is to propose a narrative framework for retail structures. It illustrates the fact that the narrative is not solely a product of experiential marketing, but that it may be found in any retail store. From a practical point of view, it highlights other less costly experiential narrative strategies.

From a practical point of view, it highlights other less costly experiential narrative strategies.

The original value of this study is to apply structural semiotics to analyse narratives in the store.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on mothers as key influencers in luxury retailing contexts.

Using a semiotic interpretation of mothers’ discourses, the authors underline the identity motivations for purchasing luxury apparel for their pre-adolescent children.

The paper shows that when shopping for luxury brands for their pre-adolescent children, mothers manage discrepancies between their “real” and “idealised” selves as well as the pushes and pulls of being a mother and a woman.

The findings point to possible future research on this topic, particularly with regard to investigating how luxury stores and retailers can adapt so as to satisfy mothers’ identity quest.

Managers of luxury brand retail spaces looking at the future of retailing could analyse their store environment in the light of these mothers’ identity-related motivations. As well as focussing on how children look, store layout and merchandising should provide different spaces for mothers’ identity expression, using new in-store digital technologies.

This study is one of the first to analyse luxury shopping for children taking the point of view of mothers. The paper underlines how young mothers build their new maternal identity and their projected relationship with their child through purchases of children’s luxury goods in specific retail environments.