As the rapid adoption of the Internet around the globe made digital marketing an indispensable means of gaining competitive advantage for many sectors (Leeflang, Verhoef, Dahlstrom, & Freundt, 2014), its appropriateness for luxury products remains debatable. The main lures to luxury products for many consumers are their exclusivity and rarity, two valuable attributes that are at odds with digital medias’ ubiquitousness and pervasiveness (Hennigs, Wiedmann, & Klarmann, 2012). The main purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of online promotion of luxury brands on different aspects of their brand image. Additionally, the paper checks how the impact of the Internet on luxuries’ brand image varies across different segments of luxury consumers and levels of brand luxuriousness. The main hypothesis of the study, that the Internet affects luxury brand image, is grounded in the McLuhan’s (1964) assertion that "the medium is the message". The congruence of the medium to the advertised brand has a positive effect on brand evaluations (Dahlén, 2005). Given that the Internet could serve as a tool for luxury firms to enhance their creative aspects (Okonkwo, 2009), the question arises as to how congruent the Internet is as a medium to luxury brands that sell on the basis of their exclusivity. The congruence of the Internet to the luxury brands is moderated by: the level of luxuriousness of the brand and the perceived luxury values. Dahlén, Granlund & Grenros (2009) have shown that the use of new media benefit more the “low reputation” brands rather than the “high reputation” ones. In high reputation brands consumers have expectations of higher standards from the medium and are more attentive to changes in the advertising medium. Moreover, by definition the higher the level of brand luxuriousness the higher its exclusivity and rarity. Hence, it is hypothesized that the Internet’s appropriateness as a medium will be negatively related to the luxuriousness of the brand. Luxury values influence consumer choices for luxury brands and brand image perceptions. Luxury value activation by contextual cues like the advertising medium is expected to align image perceptions to the expressed values. As a result, we expect brand image attributes that express specific luxury values to be influenced by the extent to which the medium promotes or inhibits the expression of such values. In luxuries, Wiedmann, Hennings and Siebels (2007) identified four categories of luxury values (financial, functional, individual and social) that are hypothesized to have a differential impact on the effect of the Internet to luxury brand image. To test the hypothesized relationships, an experimental design was used. Facebook was selected as a platform for “online” promotion and the stimuli were luxury watches. The results indicated online luxury promotion adversely affects luxury brand’s perceptions hedonism and uniqueness. The effects were more pronounced to the most luxurious brands and to specific luxury value segments. The results provide useful insights for the development of luxury brand strategies.

This paper attempts to develop a new more representative typology exclusively for luxury brand personalities addressing the conceptual and methodological limitations of previous works. Existing brand personality measures (e.g. Aaker, 1997; Geuens, Weijters, & Wulf, 2009; Sweeney & Brandon, 2006) are grounded on human personality taxonomies, thereby rendering their ability to accurately capture the essence of luxury brand personality doubtful. They also inherit some of the conceptual and methodological issues from Aaker’s (1997) work, for which it has been recently criticised. This evidence points towards the need for a new measurement tool for luxury brands developed from scratch. Recognising the need to provide solid foundations of the luxury brand personality traits, the present paper uses lexical approach similar to the way it was used in the human personality scale development research (Cattell, 1943; Goldberg, 1982; John, Angleitner, & Ostendorf, 1988). The main reason for using natural language as a source of luxury brand personality attributes is based on the key assumption behind the lexical approach that most important individual differences will be encrypted into the language in the course of time (John et al., 1988). Embracing this assumption, we believe that the use of luxury brand personality descriptors in the natural language will determine their importance. The first step involved doing online text mining to learn how consumers describe various luxury brands, thereby generating a pool of items. Also, in-depth interviews were undertaken with frequent luxury buyers using Kelly’s repertory grid technique to facilitate construct elicitation. Next, the list of characteristics was screened against Norman’s (1967) comprehensive list of personality traits to ensure that only personality traits were retained in the pool. Finally, a new framework was developed by means of assigning items into different dimensions based on semantic similarities of traits and was juxtaposed with existing brand personality measures. Luxury brand personality appears to comprise twelve salient personality dimensions that cannot be directly matched with existing personality measures. The new typology reveals some unique traits and dimensions that could improve the construct’s content validity and facilitate marketers’ branding decisions. Comparisons with other frameworks support the view that luxury brand personalities are different in consumers’ common parlance and require a separate measure. Some concerns related to the consistency and also content and construct validity are highlighted in this work and call for further examination.