Masstige consumption, brand happiness, and brand advocacy: A service perspective

Abstract Despite the call in literature, the masstige brands in the service industry remain unexplored exposing an important literature gap. This study employed the masstige theory to explore and conceptualize luxury service brands. An initial pre‐test study was used to identify the masstige brands in the service category. Study 2 comprised a quantitative survey on 358 identified masstige brand users for two purposes: (i) To determine the masstige mean scores of the specified brands. (ii) To examine the association between masstige consumption, brand happiness, and brand advocacy for masstige brands in the tourism and airline category. It was found that service masstige brand consumption does influence brand happiness, which further affects consumers' brand advocacy. Further, the masstige consumption and brand happiness relation was moderated by internal motivations but not external motivations. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.