The Business of Luxury Brands: Luxury Car Brand Relationship

The focus of this chapter is to provide scientific evidence of luxury businesses operating in a competitive global market, leading to further research opportunities within the involved companies. The aims of this chapter are to: (i) provide an overview of luxury brand businesses based on previous studies and secondary data; (ii) report on a study of the luxury car sector, which is a first attempt to explore how luxury values impact on brand relationships, using primary data gathered from owners and users of luxury cars. The main motivation for this study is related to seeing profound recent changes in luxury businesses. Firstly, a sort of democratisation of luxury is coming, leading to an increase in the target audience. Secondly, new markets (such as Russia, India and China) represent additional business opportunities for companies. Therefore, exploring this topic has become very interesting, providing opportunities to understand business prospects for luxury goods companies. The chapter is structured as follows; first we present an overview of the luxury brand and its business characteristics. Then we present an exploratory study about how luxury values impact on car brand relationships. The exploratory study is composed of the background and hypotheses proposed, the method, and the findings.