The growing tendency of selling luxury goods in online platforms, and strategies that luxury houses can implement

• Autor(a) principal: Freitas, Ricardo Ramalho
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/25281
• topic: Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

Researchers state that luxury houses should only use online platforms to communicate with consumers and never to sell products, because, in order to be successful in selling the product, one should be able to replicate the hedonic experience through the web (Kapferer & Bastien, 2009). However, there has been a growing tendency of selling luxury products through their websites and mobile applications (Deloitte, 2017). Thus, this dissertation looks to explore and test consumers’ associations while purchasing online, and whether this applies or not into luxury products, hypothesizing if there are strategies that can be implemented to improve it. To investigate the subject, it was conducted a study, where it was tested the already suggested tendency of consumers to look for more utilitarian products, while purchasing online, and if it extends to the luxury industry. Moreover, it was assessed if psychological distance, through temporal distance, could be a factor that influences consumers’ behaviour in purchasing luxury goods online. This study evaluated participants’ decisions between utilitarian and hedonic descriptions, regarding luxury products, both in online and offline platforms; and also assessing the participants’ attitudes towards utilitarian and hedonic dimensions of a product. Results suggest that the previously mentioned tendency can be extended to luxury products. However, it was not clear that temporal distance constituted a good manipulation, once it only presented significant differences in the way participants evaluated the utilitarian dimensions of product characteristics, when going from low to high temporal distance. The fact that consumers’ behaviour can be justified, not-only but also, by the nature of the product (if it is utilitarian or hedonic) constitutes a main insight to take from this dissertation. Also, the fact that psychological distance can be a relevant manipulation for creating strategies to improve one’s performance in online platforms, originates a series of new possible researches that can be conducted in the future.