Refinement of the brand luxury index

![CDATA[The market for luxury brands has been growing substantially over the last two decades with companies reporting record sales of up to €20 million in 2009. Despite its substantial market size, very little research has focused on the luxury market and companies base their decisions on general brand research. However, anecdotal evidence supports the view that consumers' buying processes for luxury brands are influenced by consumers' perceptions (Wiedmann et al., 2009, Vigneron and Johnson, 1999, de Bernier et al., 2008, Keller, 2009, Vigneron and Johnson, 2004, Dubois et al., 2005, Wiedmann et al., 2007). Tbis paper therefore discusses various approaches to measure consumers' perceptions to a luxury brand (Dubois and Laurent, 1994, Vigneron and Johnson, 1999, Kapferer, 1998, Wiedmann et al., 2007). The Brand Luxury Index (BLI) developed by Vigneron and Johnson (1999, 2004) remains one of the most important measures used to describe consumer perceptions of these brands. Unfortunately, there is a body of work demonstrating that the measure has both reliability and validity issues (Christodoulides et al., 2009). This paper endeavours to address the limitations of the Brand Luxury Index measure. We propose a refinement of the BLI that is theoretically derived and which addresses the empirical limitation of existing measure. We use an etymological approach for the refinement of the scale as well as exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses to verify the theoretical structures. Our results provide support for a shortened and redesigned scale.]]