Promotion of brand-related sustainability initiatives (BSI) is a modern managerial issue, as BSI seems to impact not only sustainability but also consumer psychology toward a brand. In this regard, the author has extended self-congruity theory and suggested the concept of brand-sustainability-self-congruence (BSSC) as the image congruence of the triad comprising brand, BSI, and self-concept. Former surveys report predictive effects of BSSC on consumers’ brand evaluation, leading to increased brand equity (Kumagai, 2022, 2023).

Promotion of brand-related sustainability initiatives (BSI) is a modern managerial issue, as BSI seems to impact not only sustainability but also consumer psychology toward a brand. In this regard, the author has extended self-congruity theory and suggested the concept of brand-sustainability-self-congruence (BSSC) as the image congruence of the triad comprising brand, BSI, and self-concept. Former surveys report predictive effects of BSSC on consumers’ brand evaluation, leading to increased brand equity (Kumagai, 2022, 2023).

When apparel brand managers attempt to raise their brand value, store location is a big concern since they consider it to influence their brand value. Brand managers expect that their store operations in high status location will raise brand status and attractiveness even when the expected rate of return directly generated by the store is very low. In this case, they regard the new store as an effective brand contact point of their marketing communication and expect its comprehensive impact on their business to be positive. In actual business, however, this influence is difficult to compute quantitatively but common to estimate based on brand managers’ experiences: this creates uncertainty for apparel companies whether their investment in the new store is appropriate or not. Besides, it is not certain whether non-luxury brand status is raised by store location status as with luxury brands where store location status is identified as a key marketing driver (Kapferer and Bastien, 2012). This paper focuses on the status of shopping malls and adjacent stores as store location factors and assesses their effects on perceived brand status. In this study, consumer research on three brands with different characteristics (a luxury, a non-luxury, and an unknown brand) was conducted in Japan and the variation of perceived brand status and attractiveness in four location frames (two levels of shopping mall status × two levels of adjacent store status) was analyzed. The result of Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) suggests store location prestige influences perceived brand status and attractiveness of luxury brands more than in the case of non-luxury ones. Moreover, store location status is confirmed to influence unknown brands only very slightly. This result implies that raising the status of non-luxury is difficult just by constructing a new store in high status location following luxury strategy. Also, it may be impossible for a brand whose status is not high to pretend to be a high status brand by launching a new store in high status location of the new market.