Exploring the relationship between luxury brand personality, store personality and consumer personality

This paper aims to gain a deeper understanding of luxury brand positioning in relation to brand personality, store personality and target consumer personality traits. In so doing, we hope to get a fuller explanation of brand perceptions within the market environment in which luxury transactions occur. Using a variety of secondary sources we undertook a content analysis of narratives from web pages of the Italian brand Tod’s as well as from consumer blogs relating to four Tod’s flagship stores. Our theoretical contribution enhances explanations of luxury consumption in terms of three value sources namely, (i) time (ii) social responsibility and (iii) knowledge. Managerially, we determine that consumer interaction with sales persons is critical to consumer experience of the brand based upon their understanding and expectation of the luxury it represents.