Research Summary
Research Summary
Rethinking Brand Contamination: How Consumers Maintain Distinction When Symbolic Boundaries Are Breached"
Description
If consumers view their brands as extensions of themselves, what happens when undesirable consumers adopt these same brands? I address this question by examining an issue that is of great concern to managers of high-status brands: the rampant spread of counterfeit consumption. Most managers fear that counterfeits will erode the status of their brands and cause their authentic consumers to un-adopt. This fear is justified, given the long tradition of research on social distinction and cultural capital, but the continuing success of some of the most counterfeited luxury brands suggests a more complicated consumer phenomenon. My research, based on social experiments and interviews with luxury brand consumers, examines how consumers cope when the symbolic boundaries that they view as central to the brand’s authenticity are transgressed by counterfeit consumers. I show that consumers are adept at protecting their relationships with their brands by creating new means of exclusion, without the input of managers. I exposed participants to images of consumers with both fake and authentic versions of luxury brands, and then tested the participants’ abilities to make judgments about which were “real” and which were “fake”. Interestingly, participants believe that, regardless of the presence of counterfeit versions of their brands, they can identify which consumers are in possession of a fake and make judgments about who looks like an “authentic” consumer of the brand. The results show that consumers still associate their luxury brands with high status, and have developed the ability to differentiate the “real consumers” from the “fake consumers”. I then collected data on these consumers’ attitudes toward the authentic brand. These results indicate that luxury brands can preserve their status as long as authentic consumers feel that they can be distinguished by their consumption practices and not just their brands. These authentic consumers achieve distinction by consuming as “omnivores”, skillfully indulging in brands across many tiers of status, while lower-status groups cannot do the same. I show that counterfeits can have no effect, or even help the legitimate brand, under certain circumstances. Examining the counterfeit setting provides us with an understanding of how a brand’s status can be threatened, and yet consumers can still exclude undesirables by creating new criteria for exclusion.