Moisieiev, Dmytro ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8643-7435, Ren, Chen, Rodrigo, Padmali, Koussaifi, Hiba and Chapman, Shelly (2025) The “magic lipstick”: luxury values in an economic downturn. Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal.

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Abstract

We aimed to investigate how consumers understood luxury during an economic downturn, values they gained from consuming luxury in a downturn and to refine the existing dimensions of luxury value framework.
This study was qualitative and interpretive in nature. We interviewed 16 female luxury consumers during an economic downturn in 2022-2024 in the UK and thematically analyzed the data.
The term ‘lipstick effect’, referring to increased consumption of affordable luxuries in downturns, is imprecise, as our respondents did not consume luxury lipsticks. We found that apart from escapism offered by luxury consumption, in a downturn participants were ensuring luxury’s durability and thus continued functional value, which they tied to their self-concepts as responsible consumers. Luxury was also consumed to improve well-being, which additionally generated negative emotions of guilt and shame. Some consumers were concealing luxury.
We contributed to better understanding of the construct of luxury values. We showed that in a downturn consumers turned to affordable and transformative luxury. We added durability and well-being as new luxury values, mapped to functional and symbolic value dimensions, respectively. We also added the principle of making links between different luxury values and added the links between durability (functional) and self-actualization (symbolic) and between social meaning (symbolic) and emotional value (experiential). Further, we advise marketers to prioritise ‘meaning’ and ‘doing’, over ‘owning’ luxury and to enhance visibility of durability signals of luxury, over its conspicuousness.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	'This author accepted manuscript is deposited under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC) licence. This means that anyone may distribute, adapt, and build upon the work for non-commercial purposes, subject to full attribution. If you wish to use this manuscript for commercial purposes, please contact permissions@emerald.com.'
Status:	Published
DOI:	10.1108/qmr-10-2024-0208
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HF Commerce > HF5410 Marketing. Distribution of products
School/Department:	York Business School
URI:	https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/12024

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