Francisco J Conejo, Lawrence F Cunningham, Clifford E Young
Journal of Brand Management,Pages: 1-15.
Studies increasingly question the robustness of luxury marketing’s most prominent scale, Vigneron and Johnson’s (J Brand Manag 11 (6): 484-506, 2004) Brand Luxury Index (BLI). However, these studies’ isolated and occasionally obscure nature has kept this issue outside marketing’s mainstream. Given the contextual/methodological differences between these studies, calls to evaluate the BLI further, and the importance of ascertaining this instrument’s robustness, this research is the first to systematically address the issue and provide more conclusive evidence of BLI performance. This paper comprises four studies with US students, Chinese students, US consumers, and pooled data. Results consistently indicate that the BLI is factorially unstable. On average, only 30% of its items operate adequately. The present results confirm growing BLI concerns. We conclude that luxury brand dimensionality remains