earticle

영어

As luxury brand consumption is rapidly expanding and dominant in global luxury market, it becomes very critical to understand Chinese consumers’ luxury consumption pattern. Under this circumstance, this study focuses on Chinese consumers' luxury brand attachment and its capability of keeping and reinforcing an interactive relationship between consumers and the brand. In this study, perceived quality, and private and social brand identification, as two types of brand identification, are suggested as main components for brand attachment. The authors describe how these sources can relatively influence brand attachment. This paper also examines the moderating effect of regulatory focus. Based upon empirical evidence on a survey of 269 Chinese consumers, this study shows that two types of brand identification components and perceived quality are positively related to brand attachment. Importantly, private brand identification exerts the most significant influence on brand attachment among three consumer characteristics factors. Although perceived quality and social brand identification have influence on, their impacts are less than that of private brand identification. Furthermore, regulatory focus is shown to be a significant moderating determinant in the relation of social brand identification and brand attachment. This study shed new light on luxury brand attachment by examining Chinese consumers ranked first on the luxury consumption, and by proposing the strong impact of self-centric brand image on being attached to luxury brands. One more important point is brand managers should take care of regulatory focus as consumers' psychographic characteristics when setting up marketing and brand strategies in China. Consequently, this research will not only enrich theoretical knowledge about Chinese consumers’ luxury purchase behavior, but also assist marketer to develop luxury marketing strategies in China.