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Emerging paradigms in luxury: Understanding luxury as an embodied experience in a yoga retreat holiday
Abstract
This chapter investigates the experiential nature of luxury emerging in various practices related to a yoga retreat holiday in luxury hotel premises. In foregrounding the embodied and subjective nature of luxury, we depart from the conventional understanding of luxury defined by the managerial, product- and brand-centric views (Kapferer and Bastien, 2012) towards a notion of luxury grounded in the tourist body and bodily practices. Our perspective complements the growing consumer-centred experiential luxury views. We aim to understand luxury as it appears in the embodied form in tourist practices, understanding of the contemporary world, and luxury in the premises of a yoga retreat holiday. The first author's immersive embodied and affective experience of luxury urged her and the co-authors to wonder what it is that actually creates luxury in her yoga retreat holiday experience in luxury hotel premises and how luxury is constructed from the sensory, embodied perspective.
We reflect the bodily understanding of luxury within the setting of a yoga retreat holiday. In addition to that, we draw attention to the central role of being and doing as a body (Veijola and Jokinen, 1994), bodily moving (Chronis, 2015), and sensible knowing (Strati, 2007) in tourism experience. We demonstrate the co-creation of luxury experience through observational and autoethnographic data in the premises of a luxury boutique hotel in Thailand. Autoethnographic observations support the unwrapping of subtle affectual sensations that build individual luxury in the experience setting (Edensor, 2015; Gherardi, 2017). The yoga retreat holiday experience pertains to a set of daily bodily exercise and an assortment of entangling embodied practices where the human body engages within the experiential setting of the social, material, and natural tourism environment. The given experience environment encloses encounters with other bodies (fellow yogis and guests, yoga teacher, hotel employees) and human-made (yoga shala' place of yoga', hotel premises and service, other service providers) as well as natural materialities (weather, sea, wind, nature). To understand luxury as an embodied experience, we first need to examine experiential luxury and embodiment concepts.
... Individuals interpret luxury in various ways bonded to their own life (Banister et al., 2020;Kauppinen-Räisänen, Gummerus, et al., 2019;Mora et al., 2018;Thomsen et al., 2020) and as entangled within the practices of surrounding society with its sources and effects. Yoga industry provides valuable insights into "the sensory dynamics of luxury market" (Mora et al., 2018, p. 173), in addition to which a yoga retreat holiday entails various sensory practices in which the bodily knowing of luxury may emerge (see Eskola et al. , 2022;Mora et al., 2018; see also Valtonen & Veijola, 2011). ...
... Tourism practices may entail the capacity to unfold a variable to the rational one (see Dewsbury et al., 2002;Thrift, 2008). The sensuous knowing of luxury through the acting body is much neglected in tourism practices (see Eskola et al., 2022). Current experiential studies on luxury tourism have been suggested to be complemented by the characteristics of unconventional luxury highlighting the inconspicuous and experiential forms of consumption (Iloranta, 2022;see Eckhardt et al., 2015). ...
... Berthon et al., 2009;Dion & Arnould, 2011;Joy et al., 2014) and the affective nature of luxury practices has been highlighted as focal, although this has not been elaborated much further (see Chandon et al., 2016Chandon et al., , 2019Zanette et al., 2022). Until today, studies investigating the complex nature of feelings, affects and emotions in luxury experiences are exceptionally scarce, and they represent novel topics in luxury research (see Eskola et al., 2022;Chandon et al., 2017). Commonly luxury aesthetics is discussed as related to visual beauty or solely being shaped through mental perceptions and sensory stimulation of the external senses (Wiedmann et al., 2013;Wiedmann et al., 2018;Yang & Mattila, 2016). ...
Keywords: luxury, tourism research, embodied knowing, practice theory,
sociomateriality, afect, rhythm, autoethnography
Traditionally, luxury is presented as conspicuous, expensive and extraordinary
products and services in branding and marketing literature. Nevertheless, in
contemporary society the understanding of luxury has extended towards experiential
and unconventional forms. Consumer research and unconventional luxury literature
understand luxury as a social construct in which the intangible, feeting, emotional
intensities are meaningful. Correspondingly, in luxury tourism debates an interest
towards exploring the intangible nature and variation in tourists’ interpretations of
luxury has emerged. However, the unconventional forms of luxury in tourism have
received limited attention until today. Tere is an apparent need to continue the
luxury research discussions with explorations that make visible embodied forms of
knowing and complement the dominant psychological understandings of luxury in
tourism.
As a result, this research explores the emergence of embodied knowing of
luxury in the situated, ongoing sociomaterial practices of a yoga retreat holiday.
To accomplish this task, three research questions are set: 1) In what kind
of practices does luxury unfold in a yoga retreat holiday? 2) How does the
embodied knowing of luxury emerge when engaging in practices? 3) What
does the embodied knowing of luxury empirically mean, and how can it be
methodologically studied? In this study, tourism is understood as a practice in
which the embodied knowing of luxury is emerging. Te epistemological practicetheoretical approach to embodiment originates from organisational studies and
more precisely, from the aesthetic, sociomaterial approach to practices which
see the formation of knowledge as an active embodied doing as knowing-inpractice. Exploring luxury within the tourist’s sociomaterial practices enables to
unfold the afecto-rhythmic nature that allows the capacity for luxury to emerge.
In this thesis theory, methodology and empirical approach were evolving
simultaneously. Te selected approach allowed to theoretically and empirically demonstrate how luxury emerges in a yoga retreat holiday as afecto-rhythmic
agencements. Five practice agencements were forming and recognised as follows:
Orienting, Reconnecting, Adjusting, Guarding and Releasing practice.
Empirically, the luxury phenomenon is explored within multi-sited, evocative
autoethnography over a period of fve years in yoga retreat holidays in the premises
of a luxury hotel in Tailand. In addition to the author’s personal empirical material,
the feldwork material entails photographs, videos, websites, and other material
of the hotel and yoga studios provided for tourists. However, the most essential
empirical material is carried in the knowing and afectivities of the body of the
researcher. Te body-refexivity in the autoethnographic research process enabled
to demonstrate the ephemeral, afecto-rhythmic nature of practices that emerges
as embodied luxury. Te study empirically demonstrates how the aesthetic tastebased judgements of the appropriate afecto-rhythmic nature of practices allow the
capacity to engage in the fow of embodied knowing of luxury in tourist practices.
Tis dissertation contributes to the luxury and tourism research discussions. In
luxury research, it expands the prevailing debates by showing how the lived, living
and acting sensuous body is a knowledgeable actor in tourist practices, rather than
understanding the tourist as disembodied and passive. Te study highlights the
active role of a tourist in the production of luxury experience. Second, it contributes
to practice-theoretical studies in luxury literature in theorising luxury within
the situated, ongoing sociomaterial practices that are entangled with afects and
rhythms, and accomplished together with the heterogeneous actors of human,
nonhuman and natural actors beyond the mere personalised perceptions. Tird,
it complements the discussions of unconventional luxury by drawing attention
to the intangible, inconspicuous, aesthetic and ethical nature of luxury emerging
within afecto-rhythmic sociomaterial practices. In tourism research, the dissertation
complements the existing embodiment discussions and contributes to rejecting dualistic knowledge formation. Te thesis continues the discussions of relational
sociomaterial practices in tourism and presents the body as ‘an agencement of
embodied knowing and resonant materiality that is able to afect and be afected’. It
illustrates how ethics is done in touristic practice. From the methodological perspective,
through the study of practices by means of body-refexivity in autoethnography,
the existing psychological understandings in luxury explorations are extended
in the dissertation. Te embodied and methodological approach complements
the dominant rational-cognitive methods and external observations of luxury
practices in tourism and luxury research. Te researcher’s body is seen as inherent in
unfolding the embodied luxury with the autoethnographic approach of this thesis.
Tässä katsausartikkelissa Lapin yliopiston matkailututkijat tarkastelevat teemoja, joiden voidaan katsoa sijoittuvan suomalaisen kriittisen yhteiskuntatieteellisen matkailututkimuksen keskiöön. Uuden työn, matkailun vastuullisen talouden, hitauden ja läheisyyden, monilajisuuden, osallisuuden ja kulttuurisensitiivisyyden teemojen kautta on viime vuosina rakennettu aktiivisesti tutkimusta, jota voisi kuvailla Matkailututkimuksen pohjoista koulukuntaa (Nordic School of Tourism Research) edustavaksi tutkimukseksi – tutkimukseksi, joka pyrkii muun muassa purkamaan vastakkainasetteluita (kuten me ja toiset, luonto ja kulttuuri) ja ottaa aktiivisesti kantaa siihen, millaisia matkailun maailmoja tutkijat ovat tutkimuksen kautta luomassa. Kriittinen yhteiskuntatieteellinen tutkimusote näkyy käsillä olevan katsauksen teemoissa myös siinä, että useampi teemoista tuo esiin myös muiden kuin ihmistoimijoiden roolin yhteiskuntatieteellisiä kysymyksiä käsiteltäessä.
Purpose: World Tourism Organization (WTO) recognizes image as the main aspect to be considered by a destination in its promotion and marketing process. Cities try to build valued and recognized images, established from an identity defined based on their own values. One of the strategies adopted for this construction is to hold events, through which it is possible to promote tourism, move the economy, improve the infrastructure, change the image and influence intentions to visit the destination. From the point of view of supply and demand, theorists have proposed two categories of destination image: the projected image and the perceived image. In this context, the objective of the research was to propose a model for measuring the Projected and Perceived Image through the Organizational Identity of the Volvo Ocean Race Brazil.
Design/methodology/approach: With a quali-quantitative approach, the study universe is composed of in-depth interviews with the main members of the organizing committee, documentary and netnographic analysis of the event's social networks. For the analysis and interpretation of qualitative data, the collective subject discourse was used. Documentary and netnographic analysis were by means of deductive content analysis and correspondence analysis.
Findings: The results supported the three secondary hypotheses of the research, leading to confirm the central hypothesis that the constructed organizational identity, projected by the image, is perceived by visitors to the event studied.
Originality/value: It is understood as fundamental the expansion of studies regarding projected and perceived image, identity and the possibility of its application in tourist events, as social representations, as support also for the definition of management and marketing strategies.
Events are an ever-growing phenomenon in contemporary society. They are used to make different places and spaces more visitable and to market places, products and services. Volunteers are often a significant social and economic interest group in the creation of events and festivals. The significance of the group has been recognised in event (management) literature, but little attention has been paid to the group’s knowledge and its role in event creation. Volunteers have mostly been considered as manageable objects, and the group’s knowledge and agency have been excluded.
This research focuses on volunteer knowledge and its role in the implementation of events. The research task is tackled by using the concept of co-creation to examine the event context. Co-creation discussion, originating from services marketing, relies heavily on the concept of knowledge in explaining value-creation for different offerings. In this study, event and festival environments are understood as co-creational arenas where actors practice their knowledge. To further the idea of knowledge in co-creation discussion the concept of choreography is used as an analytical framework. The concept originates from cultural and performance studies and gives access to the relationship between place, space, experiences and knowledge. Choreography constructs knowledge as active doings performed through the body that is referred to as ‘knowing’ in this study.
Empirically, the phenomenon of volunteer knowing is explored through a multi-sited, longitudinal affective autoethnography, based on the author’s work as a volunteer at Finnish festivals and events for more than ten years. In addition to personal fieldwork diaries, the data consists of stories written by other volunteers, photographs, event and festival materials for volunteers and general audiences, and a variety of traditional and social media materials, including videos. The autoethnographic approach provides an opportunity to explore the way volunteer knowledge plays a role in event co-creation.
The analysis shows how volunteer knowing manifests at different levels. At a macro-level, the study casts light on how the knowing from different life spheres, embodied by the volunteers, comes to operate in event choreography. At a meso-level, the ways in which the social, material and temporal pre-choreographies of events guide volunteer knowing are analysed. At a micro-level, the way knowing builds as kinaesthetic and affective practice is shown. The theoretical contribution of this study is threefold, and it extends to different fields of study. First, through exploring the character of volunteer, the study contributes to marketing research and furthers the understanding of the relationship between production and consumption in the co-creation discussion. The second contribution lies in event management studies, in constructing volunteer knowledge as an active phenomenon built longitudinally through different experiences. The third contribution is made to event co-creation discussions, by constructing volunteers as an active party in event co-creation. The managerial implications of the study cast light on the power structures, materialities and affectivity guiding volunteer knowing.
In this chapter we elaborate on the role of the body in autoethnographic research. We suggest that recognizing the myriad ways in which our fleshy bodies play a part in the practice of autoethnographic research, allow us to advance current methodological debates. We lean on autoethnographic fieldworks that we, as culturally oriented business and tourism scholars, have conducted. In particular, we exemplify how the recognition of the sleeping body and the affective body helps us to respond to challenges related to the study of messy, unstable, ephemeral, and ubiquitous research phenomena. We conclude by discussing the opportunities of an increased body-reflexivity in autoethnographic research process.
This article introduces a new label, ‘Affective Ethnography’, and grounds it within the debates on post-qualitative methodologies and affective methodologies. Affective ethnography is theorized as a style of research practice that acknowledges that all elements—texts, actors, materialities, language, agencies—are already entangled in complex ways, and that they should be read in their intra-actions, through one another, as data in motion/data that move. I discuss three pillars for affective ethnographies that relate to researchers’ presence in doing fieldwork and their bodily capacity to affect/be affected. The first is embodiment and embodied knowing. Doing fieldwork implies the ability to resonate with, becoming-with, and the capacity for affective attunement. The second aspect relates to place as flow, and process—to placeness. The third relates to affect as the power to act and therefore to the presence in the fieldwork of the capacity to ‘make do’, either intentionally or unintentionally.
What is the future of luxury? Using scenario planning, this paper explores four possible futures of luxury set in 2030. Scenario 1, Trading Up to Luxury, discusses how consumers with increased wealth aspire to buy luxury products and experiences. Scenario 2, Prestige Luxury, focuses on the behaviours of the seriously wealthy and examines how the mega-rich influence luxury markets. Scenario 3, Enrichment and Experiential Luxury, illustrates how the concept of luxury has become less about materialism and more about experiences. Scenario 4, Craft and Authentic Luxury, illustrates how the exclusivity of luxury is framed by craftsmanship, history and uniqueness. This paper is based on an examination of the evolution of luxury as a concept and highlights eleven contemporary drivers of change including the democratisation of luxury, demanding consumers and premium pricing. The study allows those involved in luxury industries to understand change and, using the scenarios, to position their products or experiences.
Providing customers with unique and memorable experiences to establish a positive customer–brand relationship has become one of the key challenges for brand managers. Hence, approaches to experiential marketing that appeal to all senses have increasingly gained attention. However, little is known about how to design multisensory brand experiences that lead to high and sustainable brand strength and provide the customers with a high perceived value. To better understand the causal relationships among multisensory marketing, brand experience, customer perceived value and brand strength, we conducted an empirical study in a distinctive service industry, luxury hotels that provides a good role model for learning about an approach that targets all senses. The results of our study support the assumption that multisensory marketing is an important means to establishing brand experiences. Both are key drivers of customer perceived value and significantly influence the brand strength. Moreover, the identified causal structure reveals relevant insights into the question of which components of customer perceived value (financial, functional, social and individual) are particularly influenced by multisensory marketing and brand experience, establishing brand strength. Hence, the findings provide interesting clues for the design of promising experiential marketing.
While hedonic and experiential consumption is an established area of research, the "great sleep" as a new form of hedonic consumption has been largely overlooked in this literature. We will address this gap by, firstly, bringing together existing literature on hedonic and experiential consumption and socio-cultural studies on sleep, and secondly, by developing a practice-based narrative perspective that enables us to conceptualize how "great sleep" is commodified within the field of practices that constitutes consumer culture. In this process, a specific mode of being, sleep-as-consumption, is constructed.
This study investigates the phenomenon of luxury from a consumer perspective, by means of multisited phenomenological inquiry. The findings expand the pervasive view of luxury as accumulation of highly valued goods by offering a transformative perspective of luxury as transforming the life of distant others by giving them valuable philanthropic gifts and thereby ultimately transforming the self of the giver. The paper shows how giving away economic capital (money and time), social capital (networks and influence), and cultural capital (skills and knowledge) to non-related others can provide the giver with a sense of luxury in terms of pleasure, purpose, and connection with humankind. Thus, the findings not only extend the traditional conceptualization of luxury from having to giving, but also challenge current conceptualizations of sharing out as a non-reciprocal pro-social behavior by illustrating how 'the luxury of giving' relies on both pro-social and pro-ego consumption rationales, which implicitly include circular reciprocation.
Sustainability issues have become a challenge for the luxury sector whose continuous success and growth – despite recessions, economic crises and increasing social inequality – appear as a paradox or even a provocation for some critics. Based on a program of multiple surveys involving actual luxury customers, we explain why customers are not concerned about sustainability considerations when they purchase a luxury product. But this apparent uninvolvement hides a more complex reality with high latent expectations towards luxury brands. Fundamentally, the perceived contradiction between luxury and sustainability depends on how luxury is defined by consumers: it is lower for consumers defining luxury in terms of exceptional quality. This is crucial for the defence of the legitimacy of the luxury sector as a whole, and of its most iconic brands for the future.
Luxury is in fashion and is now to be found within almost every retail, manufacturing and service sector. New terms qualifying luxury regularly appear such as 'premium', 'ultra-premium' and 'hyperluxe'. Today, luxury is everywhere - but if everything is 'luxury' then surely the term itself has no meaning? What really is a luxury product, a luxury brand or a luxury company? "The Luxury Strategy" is a definitive new work that sets the record straight. Luxury is as old as humanity and it is only by a thorough understanding of the genuine concept, that it is possible to define a rigorous set of rules for the effective management of luxury brands and products. "The Luxury Strategy" rationalizes the management of this new business concept based on the highly original methods that were used to transform small family businesses such as Ferrari, Louis Vuitton, Cartier, Chanel, Bulgari, Gucci and Prada, into global brands. "The Luxury Strategy" explains the difference between 'premium' and 'luxury', and sets out the rules to be applied to the luxury marketing mix (the opposite of those for classic marketing). It describes how to implement a luxury strategy within a company and delivers clear principles for becoming - and remaining - 'luxury'.
This paper aims to contribute to the conceptualization of the sensory dimension of tourist experiences by discussing its theoretical underpinnings. A multidisciplinary approach to the human senses shows their importance to the individual’s experience and perception of the surrounding world, recommending the appropriateness of a holistic analysis of sensescapes in tourism. A review of empirical studies conducted under the experiential paradigm of tourism on the five human senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch) evidences the use of both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, which depends on research purposes, but also the practical implications of findings and data analysis to destination marketing and management. The paper discusses the role of the senses in designing tourist experiences, and identifies important topics regarding the study of the sensory dimension of tourist experiences, considering future research opportunities.
This article is a reflection on the development of an embodied data analysis framework, leading to critical interrogations of the micro level black and brown physical performances of culture and what they reveal about macro level social inequality. Working at the intersections of social science, dance, performance, and qualitative research as well as commitments to a social science that enacts a decolonizing methodology/pedagogy, an analytic framework is choreographed toward imagining possibilities that can be created in qualitative social science research when black and brown bodies and their performances are acknowledged as sites of knowledge production.
This study inquires how consumers’ experiences of luxury relate to consumers’ selves. The
objective is to broaden our contemporary understanding of luxury experiences by departing from
the traditional view of conspicuous luxury consumption as a marker of social class. Consumer
diaries provide fundamental insights into the complex nature of luxury experiences as moments
of luxury, which are an integral part of consumers’ everyday lives. Luxury experiences are
inextricably linked with states and processes of self that revolve around multifaceted experiences
of having (materialistic self), doing (liberating, oscillating, integrating, and relating self), being
(harmony), and becoming (achievement-oriented and self-transformational). Our findings relate
to and extend current self theory and fundamentally change our understanding of luxury from its
groundings in status consumption towards a transient and abstract concept.
This article explores the relevance of dwelling and embodiment metaphorsin tourist studies. These metaphors make possible an account of tourism whichacknowledges the mobile and complex reality of the 21st century whilst neitherdelocalizing nor dis-embodying nor isolating tourists. In proposing such metaphors, Idevelop the possibilities of non-representational theory in tourist studies (Thrift, 1997).This article develops a perspective on tourism as a practical and embodied waythrough which we are involved in the world, we create knowledge and interact withthe physical environment; to put it in Heideggerian terms, a way of being-intheworld, of dwelling in it. This article is thus able to explore the possibilities that ideasof a situated, elusory and expressive body open in tourist studies and considers ade-centred and rhizomatic understanding of tourist agency that neither underminesthe material and non-material networks folded into the human world noroveremphasizes the human action, concealing the inevitably messy human condition.
The article shows that there is a close connection between knowing and learning in practice and sensible knowledge. It does so by referring to field research conducted in a variety of workplaces: a sawmill, a roofing firm and a secretarial office. The concluding remarks argue for the re-construction of organizational discourse through aesthetic understanding, because this is an approach which brings out the ‘don't-know-what’ characteristic of a large part of practical experience in organizations.
This study examines the hitherto under-explored relationships between weather, human action and the natural environment from a practice-based perspective. Using an ethnographic study on wilderness guiding in Finnish Lapland, the article first examines the integral role of weather when conceptualizing tourist activities taking place outdoors. The authors identify three types of weather-related practices: anticipating and coping with the weather, as well as discursive practices related to weather. They therefore demonstrate how weather manipulates human practices by narrowing down or extending the possibilities for outdoor activities. Second, by materializing weather, the study provides a more nuanced understanding of the diverse ways in which weather – a material entity in itself – is involved in the enactment of various socio-material practices; here the authors make the case for a specific repertoire of weather-wise skills. The study concludes that weather holds agency as it exerts a significant power in directing and redirecting human nature-based activities.
What is luxury? The concept has never received proper attention in social theory. It seemed as if luxury was a highly economic concept that did not need any further investigation. Primary and secondary needs are considered to form the basis of the luxury concept. Luxury has been viewed as useless and superfluous because it belongs to the realm of desires instead of elementary needs. This definition has often been used to stigmatize the use and demonstration of luxury. The needs-wants dichotomy was severely criticized a few decades ago. Luxury touches more than the question of necessity in society. This article attempts to outline the formulation of a definition of luxury. We leave the classic concept of luxury in favor of a more socio-semiotic approach of the concept. The bounds between luxury and some specific product property will be cut through. There is no such thing as a luxury good comparable to categories like 'cars,' or 'clothes.' Luxury is defined as a specific kind of sign value, produced in specific narratives and used in processes of stratification. As a sign, it becomes apparent that luxury is a relative concept. Every social group can be said to have its own luxury. Every social group has in fact a different kind of luxury, which means that a Cartier is no luxury in some cases where a television is highly exclusive in other cases.
This paper is a contribution to sensory-aware cultural consumer research. It suggests that while the audio-visual domain is unquestionably a crucial ingredient of contemporary consumer culture, there is a pressing need to explore the role of the other senses as well. The study works towards a practice-based culturalist approach to sensory ethnography, a perspective that allows consumer scholars to empirically account for the cultural aspects of the senses. Through an empirical case study on sport fishing, the paper scrutinizes the challenges and opportunities related to conducting sensory ethnography. In addition, it discusses the benefits of this approach in consumer research.
Many prior studies into luxury have tended to take managerial or product-focused perspectives at the expense of understanding how consumers themselves shape luxury meanings. This study proposes a focus on ‘everyday luxury’ wherein individuals work creatively with what are often mundane objects and routine activities, engaging in caretaking and escaping practices which can provide routes towards status and self-transformation. Drawing on in-depth interviews and observations with 32 young adults we develop an illustrative framework: Practices of Everyday Luxury. We contribute to an emerging literature stream which moves beyond object-focused understandings of luxury to highlight the potential for more subjective, personal and contestable understandings shaped by practice. Ultimately this development allows for a more inclusive approach, where luxury takes on meaning through practice, an understanding which is experiential, rather than solely product or brand-focused.
This study advances an unconventional perspective on the experiential essence of luxury, with the aim to uncover different types of luxury moments and shed light on their shared qualities and momentousness, independent of consumption styles or contexts. The findings of an interpretive study identify five types of luxury moments: interrupting, climactic, disrupting, ritualistic, and terminating. They differ in their temporal focus and degree of contrast to ordinary life, created through shared experiential qualities. These qualities set moments of luxury apart from other pleasurable moments, since moments of luxury are freeing, happy, perfect, scarce, caring, and exciting. The concept of luxury moments helps illuminate the essence of experiential luxury and unfolds in themes of growth and advancement, bliss and Eudaimonia, unity with the other, and awe and self-transcendence, thus adding to the understanding of the meaning of luxury in liquid times.
This study introduces the notion of “moments of care,” which describe short-lived and prosocial interpersonal interactions between healthcare consumers and medical staff, as individually defined luxuries. Findings from 30 phenomenological interviews with patients of a luxury ophthalmic clinic reveal that healthcare consumers ex- perience moments of care through (1) authentic presence, (2) balanced power relationship, and (3) interpersonal synchrony. This study contributes a phenomenological experiential perspective to the growing body of research on unconventional aspects of luxury by showing that experiencing humanity in interpersonal interactions is “true luxury” and surpasses material luxury. The findings provide a valuable source of inspiration for private and public medical institutions as well as for branded service providers.
Understanding how consumers experience luxury represents a challenge; despite the rapid growth of luxury experiences over the past decade, luxury research remains focused on a product-logic. In responding to calls for more research into luxury experiences, we draw from a three year ethnographic study in theorizing “moments of luxury,” which we define as a collectively based, consumer-driven experience that features hedonic escapism and modifications to conventional luxury characteristics. Consumption experiences become luxurious as consumers forge an unconventional form of exclusivity that builds upon aesthetic dress and movement, authentic history and decor, and exclusivity-by-practice, in achieving temporally brief, hedonic escapes from everyday life. The findings provide insights for providers of consumer experiences and for established luxury brands, both through the focus on the role of hedonic escapism in forming consumers’ luxury experiences and through the identification of an alternative form of exclusivity.
The aim of this study was to explore what luxury represents to contemporary consumers in their own life contexts. A mixed-method qualitative approach was adopted that comprised individual, personal interviews and focused interviews with small groups.
The study contributes to the field of luxury research by (1) highlighting consumers’ interpretations of luxury as highly subjective, relative and contextual; (2) showing that according to consumers, luxury relates to both consumption and non-consumption contexts; (3) illustrating the value of luxury as a multidimensional construct in both contexts; and (4) demonstrating how luxury may relate to a consumer’s desire to be meaningful and genuine, thereby generating prudential value. In these cases, luxury is closely linked to consumers’ perceptions of meaningfulness and well-being.
For marketing managers, the findings suggest that the wave of new luxury – seeking meaningfulness – may serve as a novel means of branding.
This study demonstrates that the significance of the concept of luxury transcends commercial settings and offerings, i.e., the brand, product or service. The findings show that luxury may also be generated in non-commercial contexts and specific activities (e.g., running, gardening). Based on these findings, it is proposed that luxury in non-commercial settings is characteristic of the new wave of luxury; and that in such settings, luxury may contribute to personal well-being, thereby generating prudential value.
Luxury branding has received much attention from marketing and consumer research scholars. Yet, research into how consumers themselves shape luxury brand meanings is underdeveloped. Following the resurgence of the application of theories of social practices in consumer research, we offer a novel and comprehensive typology of luxury consumption practices. In doing so, we shed light on how personalized meanings of brand luxury are emerging in the private sphere of everyday life, as luxury consumers integrate various materials, meanings, and competencies within their practice performances. The findings provide important insights for both scholars and practitioners in developing a more holistic understanding of the multi-dimensionality and fluidity of luxury brand meanings in the context of contemporary consumer culture.
In spite of considerable prior research on luxury branding, no widely accepted definition of "luxury brand" exists. The purpose of this paper is to review the literature in order to: a) summarize the state of knowledge on luxury brand marketing; and b) provide a new and usable definition of a luxury brand. A literature review was conducted with a focus on developing a more useful definition of "luxury brand," outlining key theoretical perspectives that have been used in this area, and summarizing key research findings. Ko and Megehee's (2012) framework for understanding consumption of luxury brands is used as the guiding conceptual framework for the review. Directions for future research are provided.
This paper explores some of the ways in which Northern Lights tourism is composed and performed. In particular, we will focus on the interplay between light and darkness and how tourists, tour operators and various more-than-human elements are engaged in and contribute to affective lightscapes of Northern Lights tourism through improvised choreography. The discussion is based on an ethnographic example from one Northern Lights tour. The paper advances understanding of the importance of how bodies and rhythms intertwine with the surroundings creating tourism experiences as well as contributing to the affective field of destinations.
The turn to practice has been prominent in the community of Management Learning and still occupies an important place in the debate that approaches practice from the standpoint of learning and knowing. On considering how the turn to practice contributes to the ongoing conversation on post-epistemologies, one notes a convergence with another ‘turn’. The turn to affect started more or less in the same years as the turn to practice, but the conversation between the two has not yet been fully articulated. I argue that both share a concern for (1) a relational epistemology, (2) the body and (3) sociomateriality. To show how they may interact, three vignettes are presented to illustrate their commonalities and how they try to produce in the reader an affective reaction. This article is also the outcome of an experimentation conducted with a visual writer during the Organizational Learning, Knowledge and Capabilities conference in Milan, and it proposes a reflection on the limits of representationalism.
Purpose
The luxury segment of the hospitality industry has experienced substantial growth in the past decade. Unfortunately, the notion of perceived luxury values has received scant attention, and there is a lack of valid framework to capture consumers’ value perceptions in the context of luxury hospitality services. Using luxury restaurant as an example of luxury hospitality services, this paper aims to establish the structure of luxury hospitality values and their measures and to investigate the relationship between luxury hospitality values and purchase intentions.
Design/methodology/approach
A survey questionnaire was developed to test the proposed luxury value framework. Confirmatory factor analysis and hierarchical linear regression were used to test the hypotheses.
Findings
Four luxury restaurant value dimensions including functional value, hedonic value, symbolic/expressive value and financial value were identified. The study results further reveal that a consumer’s purchase intention is influenced primarily by hedonic value, followed by functional value and financial value. Interestingly, unlike in the context of luxury goods, the purchase of luxury restaurant services is not substantially influenced by symbolic/expressive value.
Practical implications
Hospitality firms catering to the affluent might use the luxury value framework to better understand what drives their customers’ purchase intentions, and use such knowledge to create new services or to improve current product offerings. In addition, luxury hospitality companies can use this luxury value framework to position their brands/products.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first that empirically tests a luxury value framework in the luxury hospitality context and investigates the relationship between luxury hospitality values and purchase intentions.
This book seeks to advance feminist and gender tourism studies with its focus on embodiment. Broad themes include: the construction of narratives; how discourses of desire, sensuality and sexuality pervade the tourism experience; the use of the body to represent femininity, masculinity and sensuality; and how travel and tourism allow for empowerment, resistance and carnivalesque opportunities. The book has 19 chapters and a subject index.
This article looks into guided tours as an exemplary kinesthetic consumption experience and focuses on the work of tour guides as influential agents who participate in the tourism staging of the destination. As opposed to the overwhelming emphasis placed on the discursive construction of tourist places, my analytic lens is the moving body and its manifold engagement with the surrounding space. Grounded on fieldwork at a National Military Park, I provide insight into three clusters of strategies of body-space staging: spatialization, emplacement, and regulation. I also extend existing knowledge on the staging of tourist experiences by theorizing the construction of a tourism stage as an aggregate of three overlapping and intertwined staging modes: communicative, material, and body-space.
Given that luxury goods are primarily bought for what they symbolize – and in light of the rise of experiential and multi-sensory marketing approaches – it is crucial for luxury managers to create a prestigious atmosphere offline and online. However, in the ubiquity of the virtual environment where counterfeit luxury goods are only one click away, the question is: what is the best approach in the balance between mass class and high class?Due to the growing global appetite for luxury goods within the era of the “democratization of luxury” or the “luxurification of society” (Atwal/Williams 2009; Tsai 2005; Yeoman/McMahon-Beattie 2005), luxury brands are facing the challenge of using mass marketing strategies and simultaneously accentuating the exclusivity dimension of their products (Okonkwo 2010). This leads to the necessity of a better understanding of the rules and behavior in the digital marketplace. However, while being leaders on fashion trends and catwalks, luxury managers are sti ...
The desire to escape from land-based bodily constraints, to become enchanted by the spectacle of technicolour reefs, sunken ships and otherworldly creatures, is growing in popularity despite the expense and training required to explore the ocean depths. This dense water world, where a person’s resistance to gravitational pull results in differing feelings of weightlessness, where sound travels about five times faster yet more unevenly than in air, and where verbal communication is impractical such that visual cues are necessary, calls for a different ‘way of being’ to the everyday spaces of the home or the workplace. It is these different ways of being and feeling that I explore in this paper. To do this I present a sensual phenomenology that pays particular attention to the reorganization of the sensoria of a group of novice divers as they start to gain an awareness of the different perceptual means by which they move through and sense underwater space. The paper concludes by highlighting that phenomenological accounts of tourist space can shed light on the intricacies of tourists’ lived experiences, which in turn could prove useful in the structure and organization of tourist activities.
In this introduction to the theme issue on Sensuous Tourism, we further Tourist Studies’ understanding of the relationships between tourism, the body,subjectivity and space. The article reviews the ways in which the body in tourism hasbeen theorized, including metaphorical mobilizations of performance, the encounterand dwelling. The article then examines three main themes which further develop ourunderstandings of sensuality in tourism. Firstly we examine the politics of the body,space and identity by suggesting a vocabulary based in the ability of individuals toboth reproduce and innovate particular practices, representations and relations.Secondly we explore the ways in which tourists are immersed in technological fieldswhich mediate and shape the nature of interactions with people and places. Thirdlywe look at the possibility of renewing the relationship between an understanding oftourism which is informed by sensuality but which is also able to deal withcontemporary socio-economic and cultural transformations.
This paper addresses, through examples from in-depth interviews with long-term budget travelers, how culturally and socially constructed narratives about risk and adventure are manifested by individuals in backpacker communities. Such manifestation is carried out through consumption of, for instance, experiences, places, food, medicine, and clothing. It is argued that tales and acts of “risk and adventure” work particularly well in individuals' efforts to “narrate identity”. The paper also addresses a need for more gender sensitive research, through suggesting that adventurous women may be caught in an intersection between two logical systems: the reflexive life project of “late modernity” open to both genders and the adventure as a historically founded masculine practice.
Research findings on two gay pride parades in New Zealand and Australia are offered in order to argue that critical social theory on embodiment can provide new challenges to, and exciting possibilities for, tourism research. Such studies tend to produce hegemonic, disembodied, and masculinist knowledges. Social sciences have been built on a mind/body dualism that privileges the former over the latter. Feminist writing on the body has thrown the Cartesian separation of the two into question. Explicit inclusion of gendered/sexed and sexualized bodies in tourism research problematizes this dualism, thereby subverting the masculinism of tourism discourse.
Although the definition of a ‘luxury’ brand is open for debate, the natural evolution of luxury, with luxury brands first being adopted by the affluent and wealthy before inevitably being translated and reinterpreted down to mass markets, raises new challenges for marketing strategists. Luxury brands need to stay in front of luxury consumers, through the discovery of new and different ways to give expression to their desires. This paper discusses the fundamental difference between communication and connection, and identifies a means of assuring the greatest long-term success for luxury marketers by connecting with the luxury consumer using brand-related experiences.
Following a broader perspective in exploring customer perceptions of and motives for purchasing luxury brands, it is not sufficient to explain the whole picture of luxury consumption in terms of socially oriented consumer motives and the desire to impress others. The main contribution here is to explore a multidimensional framework of luxury value as a general basis for identifying value-based consumer segments. The empirical results can be seen as a first step toward a better understanding of consumers' luxury value perceptions as based on social, individual, functional, and financial aspects. ©2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Often researchers position themselves in relation to race, age and gender, but the body is less often discussed as an actual ‘instrument of research’. We aim to extend thinking on this point by reflecting on a project we conducted on migrant women and food in New Zealand. We present a vignette as an example of how we used our bodies as ‘instruments of research’ at a ‘shared lunch’ attended by new migrants from a range of different countries. At the lunch some combined on their plates spicy dishes such as kimch’i (fermented vegetables) and sweet dishes such as pavlova (a meringue dessert). For others this combination prompted feelings of disgust. We conclude that the body is a primary tool through which all interactions and emotions filter in accessing research subjects and their geographies.
There is a long history of removing oneself from ‘society’ in order to recuperate or repair. This paper considers a yoga and massage retreat in Southern Spain, and what opportunities this retreat experience might offer for recuperation and the creation of healthy bodies. The paper positions ‘nature’ as an active participant, and as ‘enrolled’ in the experiences of the retreat as a ‘therapeutic landscape’, and questions how and what particular aspects of yoga practice (in intimate relation with place) give rise to therapeutic experiences.