Investigating the Modified BLI Using Korean Luxury Consumers
Authors:   Asia-Europe Perspective Association, Kim Jieun 
Published: December 2024

The luxury brand is one of the best quality and performance brands within the product category. Consumer preferences, purchasing and use of luxury brands are often motivated by perceptions of luxuriousness and attractiveness. The brands’ luxuriousness offers psychological benefits (e.g., enhancing self-image, providing status) that contribute to meeting critical needs.
Vigneron and Johnson (2004) suggested that if you can measure your brand’s luxuriousness, you can manage it, thus, create better ideas to manage them. With that reason, they developed the Brand Luxury Index (BLI) to provide a tool to estimate the amount of perceived luxuriousness consumers associated with a brand. Their measurements included five elements: conspicuousness, uniqueness, quality, extended self, and hedonism. However, the BLI received considerable criticism, including issues of applicability beyond business students and issues of discriminatory and integrated validity.
In 2015, Kim and Johnson revised the original BLI in order to improve validity of the BLI measurement scale and increase the understanding of the words used in the original scale. As a result, the modified BLI was developed through FGI and factor analysis method and it includes five dimensions (i.e., quality, extended-self, hedonism, accessibility, and tradition), but the content of these dimensions differs from the original BLI conceptualization (i.e., conspicuousness, uniqueness, quality, hedonism, extended-self).
The modified BLI was developed in USA using responses from USA residents and the data that was collected pretty long ago, thus, this research goal was to investigate whether the modified BLI scale works with Korea participants and in these days (in 2021) as well.
The data was collected using the Google Online Survey tool, while the Survey participants were gathered a snow bowling method. A cyber university students whose major is fashion were mostly employed, and their ages and education levels vary widely. The age group, occupation group, and education level vary as follows. The average age of the survey participants was 37 years old. Most of them are women (77% female and 23% male), and the largest number of education levels were currently four-year college students or graduates, accounting for 59%. Since the questions in the questionnaire should indicate their perception of a certain brand, they were asked to answer each question for three brands. Two brands (Louis Vuitton, Coach) were assigned by the researcher, and the rest of the brands were asked by the person who participated in the survey to select and answer their favorite brands(X-brand).
As a result of the study, in this study, it was found that the five factors (14 items) included in “Modified BLI” could not properly evaluate the characteristics of luxury brands recognized by Korean consumers. Using answers to three brands (X-brand, Louis Vuitton, Coach), each brand data was put into the above model and analyzed by CFA, but all three data were not acceptable in the above model (modified BLI). In other words, it can be interpreted that the “Modified BLI” model (5 factors, 14 items) was not suitable for the Korean survey data collected in 2021
Consequently, this research revealed that the five dimensions(14 items) included in the modified BLI scale can no longer consistently access the features of luxury goods recognized by at least Korean luxury consumers. The modified BLI model(5 dimensions with 14 items) did not fit with the new data collected from Korean participants in 2021. All the model fits with the data regarding the three brands(X-brand, Louis Vuitton, Coach) were not acceptable.