Cooler Temperatures Can Heighten Perception of Luxury
Photo Credit: With its use of marble, glass, and metal, the Academia of Athens, part of Marriott's Autograph Collection, might be perceived as a cool environment, which telegraphs luxury. Autograph Collection Hotels
Skift Take
How consumers feel about luxury products may depend on how they feel. That is, whether they perceive something to be hot or cold.
As we have been reporting recently in New Luxury, there’s a great deal of room for travel marketers to explore how sensations can, in nonconscious ways, influence behavior and decision-making.
According to Rhonda Hadi, associate professor of marketing at Oxford University, the power of the senses is underexploited by marketers. That’s why she and a fellow researcher from Musashi University in Japan decided to explore what role temperature may play in selling luxury.
Shivering for Status: When Cold Temperatures Increase Product Evaluation examines the link between high‐status consumer goods and temperature. The researchers set out to “propose and demonstrate that physical cold can indeed increase consumers’ perceptions of a product's status signaling and luxuriousness.”
To demonstrate this thesis, they focused on two ways of manipulating physical products and temperature. One was tactile; the other visual. In the first set of studies, various luxury objects were ser
