Correspondence: Yann Truong, Ecole Supérieur de Commerce de Rennes 2, rue Robert D'Arbrissel 35000 Rennes France. E-mail: yanntruong@gmail.com

¹is Assistant Professor of Marketing at ESC Rennes Business School and the head of the school's Research Center in Technology and Innovation Management. His research interests are in the area of new luxury branding and telecommunication marketing. He is an expert in quantitative methods including Structural Equation Modeling.

²is Professor of Marketing at ESC Rennes. His research interests include the effect of verbalised emotions on loyalty in written complaints, and the effects of service guarantees and recovery type on service evaluations after a service recovery.

³is Director of the Centre for Marketing, Communications and International Strategy at Hull University. His research topics are in the area of integrated marketing communications and general marketing.

Received 23 March 2008; Revised 23 March 2008.

Abstract

New luxury brand positioning strategies often combine a high perceived prestige with reasonable price premiums in order to attract middle-class consumers. These strategies are radically different from those implemented by traditional luxury brand owners, who maintain a strict consistency between perceived prestige and price premiums so as to preserve their brand's exclusivity. Although some authors have suggested the existence of masstige strategies, few empirical studies have been conducted to support this claim. The results confirmed that the two brands under study have adopted a masstige positioning strategy. The authors also discuss the implications of masstige strategies for researchers and practitioners.