Luxury customers
Because each of us views luxury in a different way, how do we segment the luxury consumer? We can rank consumers based on annual spending, but is the annual spending enough to predict which products consumers are going to buy and which brands they will gravitate to?
Sociocultural modernity (mobility, openness to change) plays an equal role alongside money, since 60 per cent of the heavy users are socioculturally ‘advanced. Higher incomes account for 61 per cent of luxury’s ‘heavy users’, but 39 per cent of multiple purchasers are not among the most wealthy. According to Dubois, ‘to move into modernity is to double the probability of acquiring luxury products among the rich – moving from 5.4 per cent to 11.3 per cent – and from 2 per cent to 5 per cent among the less rich’.
Interestingly, two competing factors may explain the rate of luxury purchases in one person: the income level, of course, but also the person’s ‘modernity’, that is their openness to change, to external influences. According to the data published by RISC, clients with smaller incomes still purchase luxury when they have a modern orientation.
Apart from that, Level of education is the second factor that besides income level: a higher level of study increases the propensity to buy luxury.
Age is also linked to the propensity to buy luxury, but the relation is not a linear one: it has the form of a bell curve, with the peak being reached among the 35–49 age group.
2024.3.1