Dimensions of Luxury Service Personal Values in Confucian Culture – Scale Development and Validation

Abstract

The global shift of the luxury market across national borders has attracted attention from researchers in recent years. Luxury products are no longer a niche sector for only the wealthy. They have become a prospering market for a vastly enlarged clientele encompassing the upper-middle class. Luxury highlights the complex interplay between the individual and contextual influences and is mainly conceptualized through pleasure and special feelings in comparison with ordinary experiences. Luxury service not only carries common service characteristics but also conveys distinctive advantages such as experiential delights and symbolic utilities. Hence, the luxury service should emphasize its differences from luxury goods consumption and the influence of cultural basis. Consumer behaviorists have long recognized the importance of values in consumer psychology. Values are at the highest abstract level in the means-end chain model reflecting the hierarchical cognitive order of customers. Moreover, personal values are the mind frame of individuals in life and connote strong emotional impacts such as happiness and fun. Regarding service usage, the means-end chain model’s highest level is the construct of service personal values, which is initially proposed by Lages & Fernandes (2005) to express the service’s contents associated with the personal values of customers. In terms of the extraordinary phenomenon of luxury consumption, luxury service customers deal with maximizing their personal utility to satisfy their desires and psychological goals. Hence, overall luxury value perception depends on the cultural setting and the people involved. In the context of service consumption, the personal value perceived by the customer of the luxury segment, which lies at a higher level of expectation, will be formed from different evaluations compared to other segments. Confucianism is a culmination of thoughts of the social philosophy that defines Confucian customers’ individuality and influences their behaviors, standards, and viewpoints. Confucian ideology has significantly impacted the lives of people in Eastern culture for thousands of years. Furthermore, Confucianism’s philosophy significantly shapes the way Confucian customers perceive their personal values which are at the highest layer of the cognitive chain that comes from luxury consumption. This thesis argues that the prominence of luxury consumption and the Confucian cultural nucleus have not been thoroughly studied in the service personal values construct of Lages & Fernandes (2005). Thus, the current study aims to build a measurement scale in capturing the luxury service personal values in the Confucian culture. It serves as an important step to better understand the customers’ personal values which is the highest abstract level of customers’ cognitive hierarchy for luxury service consumption. This thesis utilized the mixed-method approach which focused on a rigorous multi-stage scale development process with five separate studies. The qualitative research conducted three focus group discussions while the quantitative approach conformed recommendation of the four-step procedure to develop and validate the measurement instruments. The participants were customers who have used luxury hospitality services in Vietnam, where Confucianism is the dominant cultural paradigm. The findings proposed the new construct of luxury service personal values in line with a newly developed scale, namely LUXSPV, which contains four dimensions: experiential life, self-enhancement, social recognition, and social integration to measure customers’ personal values for luxury service consumption. The Confucian cultural impact on the scale was discovered through the qualitative research findings in terms of Service values to face-saving consciousness dimension, however, it was not finally verified in the LUXSPV scale. The research findings also supported the positive relationship between the LUXSPV scale, and customers’ satisfaction and positive word of-mouth. This study takes a broader view in order to present the personal values which are seen as the desired end in the customers’ cognitive hierarchy for luxury service consumption. On the theoretical aspect, the current research provides scholars the awareness of a wide variety of service tiers from the customer perspective, which is an important starting point to enhance a different conceptualization and deep insight into the definition of luxury consumption. The research findings also explicate further understanding of the Confucian culture. In terms of practical implications, the current research implies that the personal values constitute the customers’ cognitive lens through which they view the world. Personal values reflect customers’ priorities on luxury service consumption. Thus, a key to success for both luxury service marketers and operators lies in providing services that enhance customers’ personal values, which allow service providers to intercommunicate with the consumers’ core. The present study suffers from limitations, which offer the potential for further research. The question of the generalizability of research results was raised due to the samples used in this study. In specific, the convenience sampling method might incur a limitation in that it is at risk of uncertain confounders. In relation to cultural effects, there has been a change in cultural awareness in those Confucianist countries that today have well integrated with Western cultures (e.g., China, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore). This entails the appearance of a generation of customers whose “viewpoints and attitudes are profoundly different from those of their parents” (Moore 2005, p.357). This might affect the impact of Confucian culture on customer perspectives. Although such limitations are often unavoidable, the research findings are not detracted from the significance and give a foundation for future research. Further study should perform the empirical verification of the LUXSPV scale in a wide range of luxury hospitality services concerning different cultural domains.