Don’t Tell Me to Have, but to Do It! The Role of Luxury Desirability Motives in Reducing Counterfeiting Schadenfreude

This paper postulates that consumers’ desire for doing-luxury – pursuing luxury with the intention of acquiring a life experience (vs. having-luxury) – pursuing luxury with the intention of acquiring a material good reduces counterfeiting schadenfreude – consumers’ feelings of pleasure from the losses of luxury brands due to counterfeiting. Two experiments employed various methods of invoking doing-luxury (vs. having-luxury) – actual product exposure and brand positioning to test the predicted framework. The results demonstrate that doing-luxury (vs. having-luxury) leads to a lower counterfeiting schadenfreude; an effect explained by the lower perceived similarity. This research makes an important contribution to the counterfeiting and experiential marketing literature by demonstrating the role of brand positioning in reducing a critical counterfeit-related social emotion. The results also validate the relevance of the intentions-based distinction of experiential versus material purchases in predicting counterfeiting schadenfreude. To reduce counterfeiting schadenfreude, luxury brands must signal an ephemeral image focusing on moments of luxury rather than functions of luxury. In addition, ad appeals must invoke sensory elements, feelings, emotions, imagination, and mental stimulation rather than the hard facts about the products per se.