Do prestige sensitivity and altruism moderate the effects of customers’ emotions on WOM? An investigation of luxury retailers

Purpose
This study adopts the stimulus–organism–response model to examine relationships between the retail environment and customers’ emotions (i.e. pleasure and arousal), prestige sensitivity and word-of-mouth (WOM) intentions towards two luxury retailers: Luxury Brand A and Luxury Brand B.

Design/methodology/approach
Data were obtained from a sample of 135 Chinese customers who had purchased Luxury Brand A and 130 Chinese customers who had purchased Luxury Brand B directly from each retailer. The relationships between these two retailers were compared via partial least squares–Henseler’s multi-group analysis (MGA).

Findings
Findings indicated that pleasure and arousal did not play mediating roles between the retail environment and WOM intention for either customer group. Prestige sensitivity did not moderate customers’ emotions about Luxury Brand A or Luxury Brand B. Altruism served as a moderator between emotions (i.e. pleasure/arousal) and WOM intention regarding Luxury Brand B but was not a significant moderator for Luxury Brand A. Additionally, MGA suggested non-significant differences between Luxury Brands A and B. Implications for the luxury retail literature and luxury marketers are provided accordingly.

Originality/value
This study is one of the earliest to examine the moderating roles of price sensitivity and altruism on associations between the retail environment and customers’ emotions, prestige sensitivity, and WOM intentions in a luxury retail context. An MGA of customers for Luxury Brand A and Luxury Brand B was innovatively performed to evaluate the proposed framework.