Historical Abstracts

Mouna Bounaouas

Ph.D. Student, Nice University, France.

Candy Kolenc

Lecturer, Bordeaux 1 University, France.

How Young French Consumers Perceive and Define

the Luxury Experience: An Exploratory Study

Considerable marketing research has been conducted about
experiential consumption. However, no empirical work combines
experience and luxury areas. This paper aims to define the luxury
experience of French young consumers. The authors conducted a
qualitative study (25 biographical stories) relating various individual
experiences dealing with luxury sector. The findings suggest that
specific emotions are generated by particular components of luxury
perceived experience. The first part deals with experience and how to
produce and control the experience consumption. The second part
concerns the luxury perceived values and consumer’s attitudes toward
luxury.
Four main categories have been identified.

1. The luxury offer: In the two cases (direct and indirect
   experience), the respondents described components of mix marketing
   (product, price, place and promotion). However, the luxury experience
   is not always produced or controlled. Experiences are not only related
   to the point of sale but involve also mythic places and towns that
   represent luxury (i.e. Paris, Monaco).


2. Feelings: experiential living implies individual emotions and
   feelings described by respondents during the consumption experience.
   Interaction with the luxury offer generates a memorable living with
   intense emotions. The authors noticed that negative emotions were
   likely to appear when the contact employees seem unpleasant.


3. Individual representations: Luxury representations make
   consumers able to evaluate their own experience. However, positive or
   negative experience can affect individual representations, which
   depend on common beliefs and luxury familiarity.


4. Consumer values: the valorization of the luxury experience is
   mainly dominated by social oriented values. In this way, consumer
   values are generated by the offer’s components and appear closely
   linked to luxury representations.
   The main contributions of this work are to understand the luxury
   experience and to highlight the role of individual representations and
   the perceived values in the construction of its definition. Finally, the
   luxury experience definition seems to evolve with the renewal of the
   experience.