THE IMPACT OF MATERIALISM AND VANITY ON PURCHASING BEHAVIOR OF LUXURY BRANDS: EVIDENCE FROM INDIAN LUXURY CONSUMERS

Even though consumers favor luxury products in Eastern societies including India, there exists dearth of literature that explores the relationship between materialism and luxury purchase intentions and between vanity and luxury purchase intentions in the Indian context. Logically, the factors responsible for luxury purchase behavior and their respective influence may not be the same between West and East. However, unlike in the West, not enough research studies have so far been around eastern or Indian context. With a dearth of literature in India, researchers have made it imperative to study the impact of materialism and vanity on luxury purchase behavior. This paper empirically examines the influence of materialism and vanity on luxury brand purchasing intentions. The aim of the study is to investigate luxury consumption buying behavior by examining the antecedents of luxury brand purchase intentions among customers in three metropolitan cities of the Indian market. The sample of the study was 270 subjects who were real luxury brand users (those who had purchased a luxury brand in the past year). The data was collected in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. Self-administered survey questionnaires were given to respondents at shopping mall exits; five-star hotels and fine-dining restaurants (mostly located in high-end shopping malls). In the present study, vanity and materialism have been found to have a positive and significant impact on luxury purchasing intentions