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

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 ofgrowing interest in literature, bringing out the aspects of the relationshipbetween luxury brands and Brazilian customers.