Masstige collaborations, temporary collaborations among fast fashion and luxury brands, are becoming increasingly popular. Despite this, no research so far has analyzed consumers’ reactions towards this new fashion practice. The aim of this research is to investigate the emotions and relevant linguistic elements associated with consumers’ reactions to masstige collaborations.

New-born “masstige collaborations” are the temporary partnerships between luxury brands and mass-market retailers (e.g. H&M-Balmain, Missoni-Target, Luck et al., 2014), characterized by limited duration and supply. Borrowing Silverstein and Fiske’s definition of masstige (2003), in the case of masstige collaborations one luxury brand (“prestige”) and one mass-market retailer (“mass”) collaborate for creating a limited amount of items (e.g. a capsule collection) to be sold via the mass retailer, at a premium price, and for a limited period of time. Interestingly, no study so far has empirically proved consumers’ reactions towards this marketing practice, especially from the perspective of consumers of the mass-market retailer not able to purchase anything. Given the nature of masstige collaborations (limited supply and short availability), not all consumers can manage to buy products during these sales. The missed purchase can lead to two different cognitive states, broadly categorized into regret (e.g. Simonson 1992) and frustration (e.g. Strebel et al., 2004). On one side, consumers experiencing a non-purchase may regret that, feeling self-blame and engaging in ameliorative behaviors (second chance) for achieving the desired outcome (Zeelenberg et al. 2001). On the other side, non-purchase can also be translated into frustration, caused by external circumstances not under a person’s control (e.g. caused by a company), where people rely on blame attribution (e.g. Roseman, 1991) abandoning the outcome they wanted to achieve. We therefore ask ourselves what happens when consumers do not manage to purchase products of the masstige collaboration collection and how they react to such feeling, especially when they attribute the missed purchase to causes not attributable to themselves and experience frustration. What drives consumers in experiencing frustration vs. regret? Which are the antecedents of frustration and the coping strategies consumers employ? To answer these questions, we analyzed 780 posts written on Twitter during a masstige collaboration carried out in the fashion sector (H&M-Balmain). The qualitative analysis especially shows the negative feelings emerged during the partnership toward the mass-market brand (i.e. frustration and its antecedents). Further, we propose a new theoretical model, i.e. the “regret-frustration model”, emphasizing which are the causes that let consumers experience frustration (vs. regret) and which the coping strategies might be.

Over the years, luxury has built-up a reputation as recession proof industry. Even though the industry growth has slowed down in the mid 2000s, luxury firms have managed to cope with economic contingencies and shortening traditional demand by widening their clientele base to prestige mass consumption ― the “masstige clientele”. Doing so, luxury firms have been pursuing a dual strategy by wooing aspirational consumers as well as their traditional elite customers, thus managing the challenge of handling both a differentiation strategy based on scarcity and uniqueness, and increased volumes of sales. This has been a trend in mature markets such as Europe, the United States and Japan, but was significantly fostered by expanding into emerging markets. Sector specialists thus expect China to remain a major structural growth area in the medium term, where the number of both high-end clients as well as new aspirational consumers will substantially increase and influence firms strategy.