Unsustainable Luxury and Negative Word-Of-Mouth: the Role of Shame and Consumers’ Cultural Orientation

Sustainability is often treated as an unimportant driver of luxury consumption (Davies et al. 2012), if not simply deleterious to their perceptions about the quality of luxury items (Achabou and Dekhili 2013). Although most studies have focused on the link between lux- ury and positive emotions such as pride, prior research neglected to explore the association between luxury and negative emotions. To supplement this growing literature, rst, we investigate how nega- tive emotions—shame in particular—a ect unsustainable luxury consumption. We propose that messages highlighting the unsustain- able (vs. sustainable) nature of luxury products may trigger a sense of shame in consumers, which will then a ect their subsequent behav- ioral intentions, in particular their intention to share negative word- of-mouth (hereafter, NWOM). We also study the moderating role of culture (Hofstede et al. 2010) by focusing on individualism (the tendency to seek personal rewards) versus collectivism (the tendency to prize collective wellbeing). These orientations are relevant to sus- tainability research, inasmuch as sustainability is linked to people’s concern about making a positive (or at least non-negative) contribu- tion to the well-being of society. In this research, we speci cally examine NWOM as a type of pro-social behavior that follows consumers’ exposure to messages emphasizing the unsustainable (versus sustainable) nature of luxury goods. Because shame leads individuals to engage in coping be- haviors aimed at restoring their self-worth (Duhachek et al. 2012), we expect, rst of all, that ashamed consumers would strive to re- store a positive view of themselves by engaging in NWOM. Exist- ing research shows indeed that people engage in WOM behavior to re-establish a positive self-image in social contexts (De Angelis et al. 2012). Second, we consider consumers’ cultural orientation as a moderator of the e ect of unsustainable-luxury driven shame on NWOM and predict that shame will increase (decrease) the tendency to share NWOM about a company selling an unsustainable luxury product when consumers have a collectivistic (individualistic) cul- tural orientation. We expect indeed that individualistic consumers will be more concerned with preserving their social image than oth- ers’ welfare.