Self-Construals Theory Applications for an Effective Communication of Sustainable Luxury

The next generations of luxury buyers will be increasingly involved in social and environmental issues, gradually asking for more CSR accountability. Luxury maisons, despite recognizing sustainability as a business imperative, seldom communicate their initiatives due to the apparent incompatibility of the two worlds. Past research has demonstrated how the concurrent elicitation of conflicting concepts of self-enhancement and self-transcendence typical of sustainable luxury communication negatively impact brand evaluation. This study investigates how self-construal manipulation plays a role in mitigating the cognitive disfluency phenomenon arising from CSR communication by luxury brands. On a sample of Americans and Italians, three different priming conditions are tested: an independent prime, an interdependent (collective) prime, and a neutral prime. The results of the experiment reveal that eliciting the interdependent self-construal by emphasizing collective concepts prior to the CSR message exposure positively affects brand evaluation via an increase in information fluency.