| dc.description.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. | en_US |
