The Relational Aspects of Luxury Consumption in Brazil: The development of a Luxury Customer Relationship Perception Scale and the Analysis of Brand Personality Influence on Relationship Perception on Luxury Fashion Brands

ABSTRACT The main objective of this article is to develop a scale to measure relationship perception among customers of luxury fashion brands in Brazil. We followed Churchill's (1979) and Rossiter's (2002) guidelines on scale development, emcompassing interviews and the creation of a pilot version of the scale, that went through two purification processes - exploraroty and confirmatory factor analysis. The Luxury Customer Relationship Perception Scale is a 20 items instrument composed by three primary factors (brand experience, customer loyalty and brand image) and a second order factor (customer relationship perception), with good psychometric indices. As a secondary objective, we tested the relation between the dimensions of brand personality on relationship perception in the luxury context, confirming a prediction relation between these variables. Regarding our contributions, we propose a new metric for marketing literature, which enables future relational studies with other consumer behavior constructs. Then, we empirically show the impact of brand personality on relationship perception, filling a gap on literature that can also help the research on the antecedents of relationship marketing. Lastly, we analyse luxury consumption in an emerging country, a topic of growing interest in literature, bringing out the aspects of the relationship between luxury brands and Brazilian customers.