Are sustainable luxury goods a paradox for millennials?

The purpose of this study is to examine how luxury brand descriptions influence millennials’ impression of luxury, impression of sustainability, attitude toward brand and purchase intention using the impression formation theory.

A between-subjects experimental design was used to test the research model, wherein two randomly assigned groups received an online experiment with either a luxury-only or a sustainable-luxury brand description.

Findings included that the impression of luxury did not change for a sustainable-luxury brand describing the use of recycled materials as compared to a luxury-only brand without the description of recycled materials present. Therefore, millennials perceived the luxury-only and sustainable-luxury brands to provide an impression of luxury, which was the sole impression to significantly predict attitude toward the brand. In addition, the results indicated that attitude positively influenced purchase intention for both brand descriptions.

This study provides support for luxury brands to transition toward sustainable efforts of using recycled materials in their goods as the impression of luxury is preserved, and provide marketing communication that favors sustainable brand positioning. This is one of the first empirical studies that focused on exploring sustainability strategies for luxury brands targeting a specific market segment (i.e. millennials in the United States of America).