Getting over discomfort in luxury brand stores: How pop-up stores affect perceptions of luxury, embarrassment, and store evaluations

The shift to an experiential economy—in which consumers are searching for memorable experiences—has led to an increased attention to the aesthetics of store environments. Because luxury brands are expected to help consumers accomplish status-seeking purposes, and thus must provide emotional rewards through the environment of their retail stores, the design of their store environments is particularly important. In this context, a question that arises is whether the emotions that luxury stores engender are always positive. What we posit in this research is that in refined luxury retail stores consumers potentially may feel the negative emotion of embarrassment. Therefore, the issue we examine here is that of the efficacy of pop-up stores, referring to temporary itinerant retail spaces intentionally opened for a short time period. We suggest that because their design might lead them to be perceived as less luxurious than traditional luxury stores, they may lead to less embarrassment and thus may reveal an interesting unconventional retail format for luxury brands. Building on the stimulus-organism-response model (Mehrabian and Russell, 1974) and two experiments, we provide evidence for this notion. We also show that need for uniqueness moderates the effects of pop-up stores on anticipated embarrassment. Consumers who do not value exclusivity when shopping exhibit the lowest degree of anticipated embarrassment, this degree being the one that differs the most across the two traditional and pop-up retail formats. Taken together, the results of these two studies enhance the theoretical progress for luxury pop-up retail stores and highlight the advantages of this unconventional format for luxury brands.