This paper explores the dynamics of luxury mobile experiences and focuses on status-seeking as a key driver of engagement. By synthesizing the luxury research and mobile commerce literature, the authors argue that fashion opinion leaders and younger consumers shown to exhibit status-seeking propensities and demonstrate high involvement with fashion and smartphones, which likely increases their adoption of luxury mobile apps. Therefore, five hypotheses were drawn from Vigneron and Johnson's (1999) prestige-seeking consumer behavior framework to develop a theoretical model and empirically test these assumptions. This model enabled the researchers to conceptualize and investigate the relationships between fashion opinion leadership, age, status-seeking, and mobile interaction intentions. Then, data were collected from an online panel of luxury brand enthusiasts (n = 919) and validated with Structural Equation Modeling (MPlus 8.9). The findings confirm that fashion opinion leadership is positively associated with status-seeking, whereas age is inversely associated with status-seeking. In addition, status-seeking and fashion opinion leadership were found to increase mobile interaction intentions, such as creating, sharing, and browsing user-generated content and streaming branded content. Yet, age does not significantly decrease relative to mobile interaction intentions. The paper concludes that luxury mobile apps should foster a sense of exclusivity and enhance perceived status among consumers, irrespective of age. These insights are crucial for luxury brand managers aiming to ensure that mobile apps produce status-driven experiences without diluting the mystique of luxury brands.
Lawry et al. (Mon,) studied this question.