Conceptualising luxury brand attachment : scale development and validation

This paper aims to conceptualise consumer’s luxury brand attachment by developing and validating a psychometric scale through five studies. Study 1 generates and selects potential scale items through literature review, thesaurus search, and expert surveys. Study 2 reduces the items and assesses the dimensionality of the scale. Study 3 validates the dimensionality of the scale. Next, study 4 assesses the four types of validities (convergent, discriminate, predictive, and nomological) for the scale. Finally, study 5 examines two behavioural indicators of luxury brand attachment. The results show a parsimonious seven-item luxury brand attachment scale. The studies confirm that there are major differences among luxury brand attachment, emotional attachments to brands, and the brand attitude scales. Besides, this research demonstrates that the luxury brand attachment is a unique construct that captures the essence of consumers’ emotional connection with luxury brands. The development and validation of luxury brand attachment scale fulfil an important gap in the luxury branding literature. The scale will provide meaningful insights for the luxury practitioners. The luxury brand attachment scale provides an improved measure and better understanding of consumer’s attachment to the luxury brands which was not accurately measured by using general attachment scales in past studies.