“Hideous but worth It: Distinctive Ugliness As a Signal of Luxury”, 2022-12-02 ():
[cf. fashion/countersignalling] Long-standing wisdom and academic research consistently agree that consumers choose attractive products and avoid ugly ones. And yet, multiple luxury brands successfully sell distinctively ugly products.
This research provides an explanation, identifying distinctive ugliness as a signal of luxury and examining its impact on consumer choice. We explore this in 7 studies, including a field study, a market pricing analysis, and 5 controlled laboratory experiments, 3 with consequential behavioral measures, incorporating a variety of fashion products, brands, esthetic manipulations, and audiences…Hypotheses:
Consumers perceive distinctive ugliness as a signal of luxury.
When from a non-luxury brand, choice is greater for attractive products than ugly ones. When from a luxury brand, distinctively ugly products are at least as likely to be chosen as distinctively attractive, as well as non-distinctively attractive and ugly, products.
The recognition of distinctive ugliness as a signal of luxury mediates the influence of distinctive ugliness on choice of luxury products.
In the context of a luxury brand, the presence of a logo increases choice unless the design is distinctively ugly.
…When products are from a non-luxury brand, consumers choose the attractive option and avoid the ugly. However, when from a luxury brand, consumers choose distinctively ugly products as often as attractive ones, not despite their ugliness but due to their ugliness and resulting ability to signal luxury. As such, brand prominence offers a boundary condition, as both a loud logo and distinctive ugliness serve to signal.
Implications for both luxury and non-luxury brands are discussed.
[Keywords: luxury, esthetics, signaling, distinctiveness, conspicuous consumption]