Chapter 12 Income and Social Class 467

Status Symbols
We tend to evaluate ourselves, our professional accomplishments, our appearance, and
our material well-being relative to others. The popular phrase “keeping up with the
Joneses” (in Japan, it’s “keeping up with the Satos”) refers to a desire to compare your
standard of living with your neighbors’—and exceed it if you can.
Often it’s not enough just to have wealth or fame; what matters is that you have more
of it than others. One study demonstrated that we assign value to loyalty programs (e.g.,
when airlines award you special status based on the number of miles you fly) at least in
part based on our level in the hierarchy relative to other members. Subjects were assigned
to “gold status” in a program where they were in the only tier, or a program where there

Cb aS I See It
Benjamin G. Voyer, ESCP Europe Business School & London School of Economics, United Kingdom

goods to enhance their status, In another study, we looked at the

W hat do you typically associate with
luxury and luxury goods? High quality,
well-crafted products, or perhaps
simply a waste of money? The display
of refined tastes or a mere attempt to
show off? Luxury goods constitute a
unique product and service category
in marketing and are interesting for a
simple reason: they often challenge
everything we know about traditional
products and services! The buying
behavior of luxury consumers, and
the meaning of luxury possessions,
has been the focus of much research
in the field. Luxury consumption has
been linked to wealth, social class,
and economic power. Research
suggests that consumers use luxury
especially when buying brands with
prominent designer logos.
Recently, researchers have
started to examine conspicuous
consumption from a different angle,
looking at whether status-enhancing
consumption was compatible
with the notion of sustainability.
Throughout history, luxury goods
have been associated with
unsustainability or unhealthiness.
Plato, for instance, suggested
that societies in which people
were consuming luxury goods
were “unhealthy” or “healthy”
societies, on the other hand, were
those in which people would limit
themselves to necessities. Overall,
luxury consumption has often been
perceived as a social and moral
transgression, denoting values of
hedonism, expense, and affluence.
In this context, could it be that
consumers actually find sustainable
luxury goods less desirable than
nonsustainable ones? We answered
this question in a series of studies
conducted with colleague Daisy
Beckham and looked at whether
luxury was seen as compatible with
sustainability. In a first study, we
found that consumers were more
likely to associate luxury brands with
words related to unsustainability
(e.g., pollution, smoke, greed,
fumes) versus words related to
sustainability (e.g., conservation,
green, trees, ecology).
effect of a “sustainability label” on
consumers’ perceptions of luxury
goods. We asked participants to rate
a series of six luxury handbags, three
of them being randomly described as
sustainable. We found that luxury bags
receiving the label “sustainable edition”
were rated, on average, as being less
luxurious than bags without such a
label. We also found that the more
expensive consumers rated a luxury
handbag, the less sustainable they
thought it was. The only consumers who
responded favorably to a sustainability
label were those who valued
sustainability as an important decision
criterion when buying a handbag. A
follow-up focus group revealed that
participants perceived luxury as being
conceptually opposed to the idea
of sustainability, and that for some,
sustainable luxury products would not
carry the same status-enhancing effects
than regular luxury products.
What is the bottom line of all this?
Given that many consumers use luxury
goods to communicate about social
status, which is typically associated with
breaking norms and rules, it seems that
a sustainability label is paradoxically
detrimental to the marketing of luxury
goods. This is something that can
be counterintuitive for luxury brands,
which often communicate on product
features, which are thought to enhance
the perception of quality and prestige
of their products (e.g., Made in France
labels).