Is artification perceived by consumers of luxury products? The research relevance of a customer-based brand equity model

This article presents an experiment that tests the capacity of consumers to recognize an artification effect on luxury brands. From a managerial viewpoint, artification is an umbrella term that covers extensive art-based strategies. Luxury brands have been especially prone to using art strategies to address the issue of commodification resulting from high production volumes and so restore perceptions of rarity and exclusiveness. The main hypothesis of this research is that artification favorably alters perceptions of rarity in luxury products and also leads to a series of positive associations at the level of the brand. Through the customer-based brand equity (CBBE) scale, the four main dimensions of brand equity from a consumer perspective (Awareness, Image, Quality, Loyalty) have been analyzed. We randomly show consumers standard Louis Vuitton (LV) luxury items, and items resulting from the collaboration between LV and artist Yayoi Kusama. Frequency of distribution, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) confirmed our hypothesis concerning both the Awareness and Image dimensions. No changes were observed at the Quality and Loyalty levels. This result opens up to further analysis on artification’s impact on brand equity, giving special attention to Brand Image, such an important and complex dimension of CBBE.