Following the resurgence of the application of theories of social practices in consumer research, we offer a comprehensive typology of luxury consumption practices. In doing so, we shed light on how personalized meanings of brand luxury are emergent in the private sphere of everyday life, as luxury consumers integrate various materials, meanings, and competencies within their practice performances. The findings provide important insights for both scholars and practitioners in developing a more holistic understanding about the multi-dimensionality and fluidly of luxury brand meanings in the context of contemporary consumer culture. Specifically, we draw attention towards the active and creative role that consumers play in constructing multiple meanings of brand luxury, and illustrate that brand luxury can be appropriated and personalized by consumers in many different ways. This ranges from being considered as a form of financial investment to facilitating an imaginary escape; from being perceived as markers of an affluent lifestyle and a conveyer of social status to emerging as resources for aspirational personalities that assist consumers in their self-transformations. Moreover, we found that consumers are not restricted to preforming only one particular luxury brand consumption practice. They can, and often do engage in different practices of luxury consumption, where each addresses different needs salient to the context of their life themes and situational influences. Finally, we show that different dimensions of luxury brand imaginary can become more or less important, depending on which practices are performed by consumers.

This paper draws on the concept of transculturality, shifting our attention beyond religion as a stable belief system toward religion as a field of transcultural practices. Our conceptualization of religion as a field of transcultural practices is empirically grounded in a hermeneutic analysis of depth interviews with 24 Southeast Asian immigrant consumers living in Auckland, New Zealand. The findings reveal two interrelated sets of transcultural practices through which religion shapes multicultural marketplaces. The first set of practices facilitates entry into multicultural marketplaces, by easing the process of border crossing and enabling social capital development. The second set of practices facilitates mutual entanglement within multicultural marketplaces, by fostering intercultural competency development, sharing of cultural consumption rituals, and enabling the flows of material resources. This paper helps to advance the growing literature on religion and marketing in two ways. First, a transcultural approach moves religion beyond a view of each religious tradition as a bounded system. Instead, religion emerges as an open and dynamic system which is deeply contextualized and whose function morphs to meet the character of the cultural context in which it is embedded. Second, in addition to the present focus on how religion produces differences in marketplace behaviors, this paper also sheds light on the transcultural properties of religion which are held in common across diverse religious traditions. Rather than becoming a dividing force in contemporary multicultural marketplaces, religious fields are also revealed to be hybridized and hybridizing fields of transcultural flows. Overall, in the context of multicultural marketplaces, religion emerges as a key site for the performance of practices which fuel transcultural dynamics.

The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, informed by cultural research on branding and active audience media uses, we develop a general tenet that consumers interpret luxury brand meanings to fulfil specific gratifications. Therefore, the consumer-perceived meanings ascribed to brand luxury can be explored as multiple themes of uses and gratifications (U&G’s). Second, we draw on this tenet to investigate a situated emic account of how consumers use luxury brands to gratify their specific needs. Third, we derive several etic concepts around emic themes that comprise higher-order, more abstract conceptual layers of the consumer-perceived brand luxury. Specifically, our interpretive reading of consumer narratives suggests that luxury brand U&G’s are multiple and divergent; however, they are not completely idiosyncratic – that is, these U&G’s can be understood more holistically in relation to how consumers perceive the dominant value(s) that are being gratified from luxury brands, and whether the U&G’s have a personal or social orientation. In so doing, we illustrate that by dialectically iterating between the emic (informants’ points of view) and etic (theoretical) perspectives, we are able to offer a more complete understanding of luxury brand meanings and their emergence in the broader context of daily life.