If You Want Happiness, Buy Luxury Brands: The Potential of Luxury Brands to Make Consumers Happy

摘要

Research, so far, has neglected the relationship between luxury brands and brand happiness. This is especially remarkable because the happiness concept is of high behavioral relevance in the context of brands and seems, due to the great potential of luxury brands for inducing hedonic experiences, to be of particular behavioral relevance in the context of luxury brands. The present paper addresses this research gap. The purpose of this paper is twofold: in a first step, we examine the question whether luxury brands make consumers happy and whether their effect on happiness is stronger than the effect produced by non-luxury brands. Furthermore, luxury brands vary in the extent to which their brand logo or patterns are visible. Hence, in a second step, we examine how signal explicitness affects brand happiness.